Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"the words of an enactment must be unambiguous before the court may interpret Parliament as intending to override rights"
Right now somebody in the HO is digging out the next version of an Act, ready and filed for just such an occasion, to go before Parliament containing just such words. They can do that now because the grown-up supervision has gone. That's why they wanted to take back control.
"Can you imagine what the reaction in Corporate America would have been if DEC or Burroughs or Sperry or IBM had made just one release that was as buggy as the code that is run as a matter of course on modern computers?"
I don't need to imagine although the country was UK and the offender ICL.
The release was a package of semi-compiled (think library module) for FORTRAN that wouldn't link. In that case it lasted about half a day - just long enough to be detected given the turn-round times of punched card jobs. How long would it take to do the equivalent roll-back today?
Maybe it's dawning on them that (a) a tit-for-tat tariff war maybe isn't good and easy to win when they see themselves having to take on more and more countries to whom they wish to sell stuff and (b) they might get a better tax take from their own coporations if they can negotiate an end to the free market in corporation tax at the expense of letting customer countries take a percentage on sales.
The legend was that a QUB prof of Botany tried for ages to get a minibus for field trips. Eventually he took advantage of the name of the VW Microbus and slipped it with a lot of other micro stuff. Legendary is far as I'm concerned because the other half of the legend is that it was written off when somebody took a right turn too quick. When I got there all we had was a battered mini which got a few of the sump fins ground off by being driven up mountains.
So they still haven't got round to getting "parcel hasn't made the expected move" into the next sprint. However, to be fair to Amazon, they're not alone in the logistics world in collapsing into a heap when something goes akilter.
Software development is about more than assuming it all goes as intended, especially where the real world is concerned.
More likely that somebody would have snapped it up and started posting stories such as Sainsbury in NI having to stock the shelves with Spar products instead of their own, numerous EU businesses refusing to ship to the UK & vice versa and M&S unable to export sweets produced in the EU (Germany) to the EU (Ireland) without having to pay duty.
Maybe they might contrast all Leave's claims about getting rid of EU red tape with the post-Brexit reality.
I'd guess W@ldo is referring to the fact that its visa system allows for tech jobs to be paid a bit more then the going rates in really low wage countries so as to ensure the tech behemoths in the US are able to get away with paying less than what would be the market rate otherwise. Whether the US tech population regards that as enthusiastically as W@ldo is questionable.
We are very well aware of how it's run. It appears that you aren't because you've not noticed the significant bit which I'll emphasise for you: free at the point of delivery.
There may be a number of issues about how its run but that central point is crucial to its nature. Feel free to re-read that until you understand just how important it is.
There seem to be a few of you who denigrate age.
Have you considered that those of us in our 70s were once as young as you are now - whatever that might be? Have you gone a step further and considered the possibility that you will be in your 70s in due course?
If being that age is such a great disadvantage in itself what are you going to do about avoiding that situation yourselves? Change the laws of physics to reverse the flow of time? Top yourselves? Or just grow up and drop your blinkered perspectives?
One of my current problems involves reworking one of our out of print books as a PDF for our website. I scanned it to PDF and then ran ocrmypdf on it and copied and pasted from the PDF into a text file so I could correct OCR errors with vi before reading them into LibreOffice Writer. What I'd missed was that a lot of full stops had been OCRed as commas. I asked for volunteer proof readers and it was one of them spotted this. She sent me a complete list and I got through about 2/3 of it before running out of will to live. I've set it aside on the basis that I'm replacing the original blurred grey on grey photos with digital colour and need better weather for that.
It would have been a doddle to have fixed them in vi first time round but I really couldn't face going back to the text files and having to re-do all the WP line spacing juggling to replicate the original page breaks (font metrics never really match up to the original).
"But as soon as someone implements it, it all goes to shite."
Yes, Red Hat went to shite in a big way. Billion dollar annual turnover since 2012, two billion since 2015, three billion since 2018. They went to shite so badly that IBM had to rescue them by buying them up for $34 billion. It's a business model that really fails big.
It still hasn't got through that much, probably most, open source code is developed by companies. The usual incentive is that it makes sense for companies to be able to collaborate on something mutually beneficial.
Qt may be a bit of an exception here in that it's always been primarily developed by a single company and hence its Achilles' heel, but I don't suppose that fits your argument too well weither.
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