Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"CHOOSE YOUR LICENCES CAREFULLY"
More or less what I was going to say. They should have understood the implications of the licence they used. No doubt they saw OSS as a trendy way to get into the market and maybe pick up some contributions and fixes but it had long term consequences that they should have anticipated.
The kitchenware industry is notorious for a steady stream of new gadgets that get used a few times & them put in the drawer.
Technological advances are rare. It took tens of thousands of years to get from knapped flint to any form of metal and a few more thousand to get to stainless steel. Again, tens of thousands of years to get from the open fire to the gas oven. A year of lockdown isn't going to have much impact there, especially when there's good money to be made in the much simpler task of flogging new attachments to the mixer.
"The unique selling point of Apple is their customers can boast that they can afford to spend silly money for ordinary tech."
The appropriate response to "Sent from my iPad" sigs is "Are you boasting, complaining or apologising?" The response to "Sent from Windows 10 Mail" is shorter, of course.
Fonts?
apt-get ttf-mscorefonts-installer fonts-arkpandora
Or just install whatever fonts your business's crayon dept decided on.
Main problem with fonts - waaay too many of them.
Styles?
Set up whatever styles to match what your business's crayon dept. decided on. They're configurable.
But basically, if you're a business that finds buying Office 2019 a problem because MS made it too hard, then why would you worry about compatibility?
"relying on code whose origins are indeterminate, whose accuracy he hasn't personally attempted to verify and for which no-one else is prepared to accept responsibility"
The open source code the GP mentions certainly makes the first two possible. It also makes it possible for respected 3rd parties to verify.
Proprietary code, of course, is likely to fail on all three counts.
Yup. What was anticipated can have a pre-planned and possibly tested process working. What wasn't anticipated is where you earn your money.
Where what wasn't anticipate was the need to have somebody around to sort it out is where somebody gets to earn even more money.
"What's probably taking the time is restoring the data to a test system"
And if they don't have a DR contract by which they've tested their restore finding that system and doing the restore are going to take quite a lot of time. That's before they manually start picking the records out. And that's before they graft the records back into the live data in a way that retains consistency.
The RDMBS I used to work with included transaction log backups as part of the backup set. On a restore the transactions were restored as after the data. Consequently if the data backup were restored to the point in time of the last data backup, a point before a deletion took place, the subsequent restoration of the transaction log would roll forward the transactions so the deletion would be repeated.
The full backup set may physically include the deleted data but the restored backup doesn't. I regard this as the normal and satisfactory way to handle backups in relation to deletions.
repeatedly called people who had been arrested but not yet tried as "criminals" instead of "suspects"
A crime is committed by one or more culprits and yet reports will almost inevitably say "suspect" instead. I suppose referring to suspects as "criminal" is the logical extension.
If I hear that somebody has been released without charge I assume it was because there was no provable case against them and that they are, therefore innocent. That is a basic principle of the English justice system (no "not proven" stuff here), has been for centuries and hopefully, despite the longings of the HO and intelligence services, will continue to be. It applies to everyone. It applies to Tory MPs and donors. It even applies to YOU. And if you think about it a little you'll realise that the reason that it applies to Tory MPs, donors and everyone else is so that it can apply to you. And if you do a little more hard thinking you might realise that that is the most valuable protection you can have under the law.
Meanwhile, those of us who've actually had the job of investigating allegations of criminal behaviour appreciate just how important it is that the subjects of those investigations do go unnamed.
"why the likes of Priti Patel have been so vague about what the actual cause was"
The last time the HO tried to brief their front person on techy matters all she thought she could remember was something about hashtags. I guess they're avoiding going there again.
There's a long history of there being records they're not allowed to keep indefinitely, that have been kept indefinitely. The excuse being the difficulty of removing them because although they should have a process for removing them, they don't. It's been reported here a number of times. The admission that they have a weeding process blows that one out of the water.
At some point there was talk of scientists having to become members of the relevant charted institute so I joined mine whilst my degree counted for admission in case they made the MIBiol exam route compulsory (I'd long since promised myself no more exams ever). The talk came to nothing but what made the membership worthwhile was a section of the magazine. It turned out most/a lot of the members were teachers and there was always a selection of exam howlers.
"The problem with Aneel's view and similar from other senior execs, is that it overlooks how modern work, well, works"
He probably belongs in the class of people who find it difficult to understand something when their livelihood depends on not understanding it. He's also selling to others of that class.
I do have a 17" laptop on order to make it easier on the eyes and I suppose at a pinch I could have gone upstairs & connected a second monitor but it's pretty chilly up there. However simply flipping between multiple desktops works fine. At one point I did have three on the go but really two was enough.
If the Black Death pandemic is anything to go by it could take a few centuries to sort out although things will probably happen faster this time and, in Western Europe, the plague was followed a generation or so earlier by a famine lasting several years which also caused substantial mortality. The consequence was to hasten - after some delay - restructuring of the economy including the end of feudal servitude and to lead to a long period during which population growth didn't restart as might have been expected.
"become reasonably resistant to Covid despite its mutations"
More likely because of them. Vaccines (and natural immunity) are largely targeted at the surface structures that enable the virus to gain access to cells. This should result in selection for mutations that change those structure. Mutations that substantially change the shape of those proteins are likely to be less efficient, especially if vaccines are re-engineered to track changes that make the virus more virulent.
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