Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I wonder if the removal of add-ons is related to this https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/
I find it an alarming account of Mozilla development. At one level is could be read as the consequence of abandoning the discipline of making architectural changes with major release numbers with minor numbers for more incremental changes. On another level it's maybe a description of the corner they'd painted themselves into which forced them to abandon that.
"Rolling out an entirely new product to a large group of users is a complex process that can easily result in issues when executed too quickly."
There's the problem. Users want to be able to decide whether they want an entirely new product. They don't want it foisted, let alone forced, on then as a routine upgrade.
"And the biggest [Microsoft idea] was the Start"
Or, to look at it another way, it consolidated the several menu buttons of CDE and its predecessor, VUE, into one. I'd been using Windows 3 to run VisionWare's X server to run VUE for since about '91.
In fact W95 had a lot of HP ideas in it. It directly incorporated stuff from HP New Era; it was right there in the copyright declarations if you looked.
MS repackaged stuff that had been going on for some time in the Unix world - X, Motif, VUE/CDE and others. The likes of Gnome and KDE picked up on the W95 interface PDQ and continued the evolution. Because of the way the GUI is layered on top of the kernel in Unix-like OSs it's been possible for them to develop in several different directions.
The aspect of the GUI that was a real innovation to my mind was an unwelcome one.: adding the X button to close a window. Previously an application was closed from the system button, the one at the left of the title bar. Now there was a button that did that right next to the maximise button, just waiting for a misplaced click. Previously closing an application couldn't be done accidentally like that so there was less need for a confirmatory dialog box so quite a few old Windows applications didn't have one. I'm sure every W95 user must have lost work when a mis-click closed the application immediately. And it still galls me that the buttons are in the wrong order - minimise, maximise, zeroise.
Maybe it depended on your TV - Droitwich is a long way away from Herne Hill. Where I lived was about 2 - 3 miles of open air to Holme Moss which, according to my cousin-in-law who worked there, had its own MW transmitter for Third, something low powered, 20 watts sticks in my mind, with the aerial suspended from one of the guys.
Our radio was pretty ancient. Does anyone remember the trick of having the choke of the HT filter double up as a speaker magnet?
"People nowadays have no idea how sensitive electronics used to be."
Or how electronically vicious they could be.
Back in the '50s the Beeb experimented with stereo broadcasts on Saturday mornings. One channel was broadcast over TV sound (don't bother to ask which channel - the Beeb and ITV only had one each) and the other over the Third Programme. Unless you were rich enough to have one of the new-fangled FM radios the Third was a weak signal on medium wave AM.
TVs were CRTs and the EHT was generated by a whacking big transformer driven by the sawtooth (more or less) waveform of the horizontal scan. The harmonics generated by that mess extended will into the medium wave so the sound on that channel was swamped by the howl the interference generated despite being only a couple of miles or so as the signal flies from the transmitter.
"The whole point of retention policy is to delete data after X days so it can’t be recovered (even from backups)."
OTOH it's quite predictable that there would be an Oh Shit moment like this and that should have been planned for. Move the data into a holding silo. Sent the timer on that to something like an hour, just long enough to apply the emergency brake. It's the reason why your mail client has a Deleted folder and your desktop has a Wastebin or Trash.
Predictable user errors should, as far as possible, be remediable.
Now the predictable has actually happened no doubt it'll be in a release Real Soon Now.
"No more downtime to install updates"
Just unscheduled downtime when the cloud provider goes down.
If I just leave that there some cloud apologist will be along to explain that despite the usual shtick about cloud taking care of resilience the punter has to arrange for multiple clouds yada yada yada to look after that.
And there goes this guy's argument that IT professionals no longer define themselves by the technology they manage. They now have to manage those aspects of cloud technology.
“But it’s increasingly more common for IT professionals to define themselves by the capabilities they excel at managing, like recruiting, marketing, finance and accounting, or sales tech.”
It sounds more like the way HR and agency pimps want to define them.
I rather think his concern isn't that information might be going to China, rather that he can't get that information himself because it's beyond the grasp of the CLOUD Act. He'd like to find out who was responsible for messing up his Tulsa rally and charge them with party pooping.
I can't imagine either Oracle or MS doing anything but lose money if they buy it. Would either of them be capable of running something that appeals to Tik Tok's market?
I'd have thought that by now Google should have a good handle on which servers are run by bar stewards. Minimise the probing to a level needed to keep an eye out for ones ones or changes in existing behaviour. At start-up the browser can then query Google to find out whether its resolver address can be trusted.
If you use a browser that does not implement all the misfeatures of Chrome, you will not get the "full experience" of a growing number of websites.
That's not necessarily a bug but a feature. At the very least it enables the worst marketing departments driving the site development to self-identify.
That Paypal window that comes up when you go to pay through Paypal to enter your password has a pre-ticked option to leave it permanently logged in.
Don't take it. This guy must have done that and this is the consequence.
Annoyingly the only other option is something to the effect of not now. The option to never show it again isn't presented. I wonder if having a default which leaves the account exposed gives him some slight leverage.
"That argument is largely analogous to arguing you aren't responsible for drunkenly driving your car through the front of someone's house because they didn't install an armco barrier at the end of their front garden."
The situation here seems to be that of a self-driving car going through the front of the house.
"After careful consideration, the university decided to work with its cyber insurance provider"
I hope the insurers in these cases are adjusting the claimants' future premiums to levels that will encourage them to be a bit more careful and impose conditions that, if not met, could result in claims being refused in future.
"It looks to me that when one works for IBM one should save up for a lawyer instead of pension."
It looks to me that when one works in sales at IBM once one reckons that the entirely non-existent cap on commissions has been reached the best thing to do is go on holiday for the rest of the period or take on a side-hustle and concentrate on that.
"These are essential for light persuasion when a bolt doesn’t go through a hole due to a burr, up to full force when loosening rusted bolts."
A long time ago I worked with a technician who used to work at Shorts (the plane makers). One of his stories was being given a design which required him to make a square hole in a timber component to take fitting a square-shafted fitting. Once he was left to get on with it he drilled an ordinary round hole, then got the fitting and a suitable hammer...
They still don't have the universal plug I had at one time. It had all the historic round pins and the now-standard square pins which retracted into the plug body and a selector to mask all the holes except those for the pins you wanted. A work of genius except that it didn't have a captive cable clamp. There was a sort of floating clamp inside held together by a self-tapper what could quite easily float between line and neutral. After --->
I abandoned it.
I'm currently trying to find a "Hare Lane" (it isn't any of those StreetMap knows about). It's on a modern hand-drawn copy of a supposedly medieval map. I suspect it's just a misreading of one of the listed landmarks at the bottom of the map but it would be nice to be certain.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
