Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It's more likely that elsergiovolador's proposal would work by obliging vendors to fix things. And, of course, with BSD and Linux the users have the ability to access the source ode anyway. Of course there's always the possibility that the vendor might opt to provide entirely undocumented and incomprehensible source code.
"If it takes a kWh to do a job then it will, give or take, proportionally more time to do it with less Watts. You save nothing."
In fact, you'll be worse off. Depending on the quality of the insulation it loses heat whilst it's above room temperature. During the elongated time to boil it will be losing moreheat which will take more energy to replace.
You omit to mention nuclear power. For the whole of my long adult life we've been shoving far more fossil fuels up power station chimneys than need be, not because their were adequate available renewables to replace it for most of that time but because of opposition to nuclear put us far behind the curve, both in terms of supply and of technology development.
I've always vaguely thought that the sort of quotes about an error discovered in step N after it was made being a power of N more expensive to correct was based on an assumed process of going back to the step where it was made, working through the whole development from there and the ultimate cost was based on the cost of each step so that the 100 times cost reflected a 10-fold cost from moving from one step to the next multiplied by a further 10-fold cost moving from that step to where you were. Whether the implied assumption was valid or that the costs were really an order of magnitude a matter for debate, of course. As the article implies it's the sort of assumption that gets easily thrown off the top of the head by an instructor in a course on development...
What is clear is that once something is in deployment the costs of fixing a bug might be insignificant compared to finding and fixing all the faulty data that's now out there.
The kind of people wanting to steal "guns" don't want either a highly accurate metre plus long single shot rifle, or a double barrel shotgun
Apart from the fact that not everyone looking for an illegal weapon is a regular criminal, they might also steal an angle grinder to go with the shotgun.
Some of a previous generation of NI lawyers had, in their younger days, seen active service in WWII, several of them in special forces. I was told of an RUC constable on protection duty for one of them who'd become a judge. The judge made clear that the officer's job, if he thought they were under attack at night, was to wake him up rather than responding himself. When he asked why the judge opened the door of the long case clock in the hall. There was a rifle inside.
It's a pity Microsoft are concentrating on phone scams. The most frequent emails on my old Hotmail account are threats purporting to come from Mcrosoft to close the account ( a few of the les competent are emailing a Hotmail address threatening to close a gmail account!) and it's very rare to see any of these trapped by Microsoft's spam filters. This is surprising given that they are 100% effective at other scams.
The other group that get through a would-be leads generators touting "their" SEO or web development services. They get my "prospective supplier" questionnaire which gently leads them to the realisations that they look unconvincing and they've paid good money for a crap email list.
Unless you need the phone for something else you don't need to spend your time wasting theirs.
"That sounds very interesting. Oh, there's someone at the door. Could you hold on a minute & I'll be back."
Eventually hang up the phone.
One salesman got that treatment twice. Then his manager rang to say they had trouble getting through with the phone. Slow learners.
For a few years we had a house like that. The insurance or building society insisted in the installation of a firebreak, some sort of mineralised panels which didn't look very substantial.
At about the same time I wasn't very pleased to discover that at work someone from facilities had visited the machine room to do work on the riser and had drilled a few holes in similar panels leaving a good deal of mineral dust about the place, this being back in the days of tape backups.
"For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren't really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents."
Not really. The default action on my desktop when opening a JPEG, or PNG is to open it in Gwenview which has limited editing options (flips, crop and change resolution) but on the right click menu there are a whole selection of others including Gimp and Pinta, neither or which are what you'd choose just to open a file for a quick look. The document and the means by which you view and edit it are both considerations. The document-centric view is that one takes primacy over the other in the user interface.
"I think that a cascading start menu should always be present, because search is only useful if you know what you're looking for, rather than what sort of thing you're looking for"
And that means that it should be organised on functional lines, not alphabetical.
"TL/DR - stop moving stuff for the sake of moving it and/or at least explain why it's being moved"
That should apply to every interface for every piece of software.
Also, if possible, add a "Classic" option to get everything back to the way it was. "Classic" might trail current by about 2 versions, only adding in the stuff from the brevious Classic that has proved its worth in the interim.
"This fifty year vet uses whichever is the quickest."
Or most suitable to the way of working.
If you have several projects on the go, each with several-to-a-lot of files involved the one you want at the moment might well be off the end of a Recent... menu (the alternative is a menu so long it takes ags to find anything). In that case a folder for each project - with sub-folders as the project grows) holding the relative documents is the way to go. For app-centric is probebly best.
At the moment I'm busy with a sort of recreation of the old Windows Cardfile program - but for Linux, of course - which will hold text, image or tabular "cards" with a view to it holding a lot of project resources.
That seems to be the other side of the plea system. It might result in many wrongful convictions but it can also result in inadequate sentences.
It appears that he was one of a conspiracy. It would be good to think that the other conspirators have also been traced and dealt with.
"There is something odd with The Home Office being able to get any Home Secretary to go native immediately upon appointment "
The former Home Sec who is currently Health Sec (something to reflect on) gave an account of how it was done in an interview with the Times. It was so effective he didn't even realise exactly what it was he was describing. OTOH some of them seem to start native.
"Former health secretary Hancock was said to be a passionate supporter of data sharing...r an affair that appeared to contravene COVID-19 restrictions was made public... The ICO is investigating that data leak."
Odd, isn't it? When it's someone else's data it's "sharing", whenit's his own it's a leak.
