Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"some designers need serious reeducation."
And have for some time. It was just possible to change a headlight bulb on my '90s Legacy but the clearance between the back of the headlight and the windscreen washer bottle - or was it the coolant bottle? - made it very awkward. Designers of any piece of machinery should be required to do a strip and rebuild of the prototypes of their products.
IFAICR Kylix failed to make it past the days of Linux 2.4 - certainly the version I had wouldn't run on 2.6.
Subsequently there was a free cross-compiler and a commercial one. The free one was limited; I tried it on a library and it complained about syntax errors which was odd because it would compile in Delphi. I can't remember what the commercial one was called but maybe this is it.
There's a lot of snobbery involved in attitudes to Delphi.
My last client had used it a lot. When I left they seemed to be recruiting an ever-growing team rewriting the application for their flagship contract in C++. They eventually lost the contract and no longer exist.
"Have you ever worked in a software business?"
Yes. I find it difficult to recognise your halcyon state of affairs.
I've had the experience of being forced by a dedicated VAX/VMS & mainframe oriented manglement to migrate to a new version of the target RDBMS engine on VMS - none of this strange Unix nonsense, thank you. It didn't go well, corrupting indexes several times a day when it met real life. We ended back on a bigger and better Unix box.
... if a vendor can package and charge license fees for Linux Desktop tooling.
But can they get customers for it?
I suspect the only ones who'll bite are mugginses in manglement who have a long history of overseeing development on Windows and have finally decided that Linux might be mportant but don't actually know anything about it and would never in a month of Sundays think of asking their staff.
"BTW, Idera/Embacardero, the company actually owner of Delphi/C++ Builder, no longer bumps the installation counters for old versions you actually bought (perpetual licenses), unless you buy one of their very expensive maintenance plans that became compulsory with the recent versions."
Free Pascal & Lazarus. Bye bye Windows, bye by Embacardero
"Book clubs, music clubs and all manner of mail-order companies were a total nightmare to deal with."
My solution with someone who, despite several "not at this address" returns was to ring them and tell them that my handling charge for future returns would be £10 a time, I would invoice and would go to the small claims court. They stopped.
My experience with house moves has been that stuff has disappeared when you get to unpack in the new house but stuff from the house before or even before that reappears for the first time in years. My theory is that they were in the last house in a parallel universe but have now crossed back.
Packing cases are portals between the said parallel universes.
"You can't force people to look at something they don't want to look at."
Maybe, maybe not, but succeeding in at least shoving it in front of them is going to be counter-productive. But, as I keep saying, the advertising industry is only interested in selling advertising, not its clients' products.
"Let them do their worst with the data. But ensure that courts only accept legally obtained and processed evidence."
Does that mean that if your neighbour who happens to have access decides to check up you and your friends that's OK because it's just for private consumption and not going to go near the courts?
It's no use just sitting there saying this or that was done illegally. It's also of dubious use saying it was this or that public body. If something was being done illegally there should be prosecutions of the individuals responsible. A charge of misfeasance in public office could be used if there is no specific charge available.
There's a good argument to be made for requiring a fitness to govern test for anyone aspiring to public office at any level from local govt. upwards.
There used to be an exam for candidates for the Civil Service but any fool could, and often did, get into Parliament. Perhaps it's time to bring that back, at least for positions of administrative responsibility and require candidates for public office to pass it. Maybe retest periodically at age 70 & above.
PPE graduates should, of course, undergo substantial retraining before being allowed to even take the test.
"although it looks like a static banner advertising Microsoft Azure with a link, the fingerprinting code is running in the background."
And what do Microsoft have to say about it?
Let me guess:
Rogue 3rd party advertising agency.
A former member of staff.
We take your/cusotmers'/the Universe's privacy seriously.
Only a few people affected.
Lessons learned.
Steps taken to prevent a repeat.
Next time it'll be better obfuscated - oops, that's what we really meant but it slipped out accidentally.
"The tracking, advertising and monetization story on the internet is convoluted beyond measure, driven by huge global revenue involved, estimated at $298.1bn in 2019"
Does this represent value for money for the advertisers? I seriously doubt it. The few ads I see from search engines fall into two categories. One is irrelevant and the other is the exact ting I was looking for which the search thing should have thrown up anyway without the search target paying for it to be put there.
In fact I don't recall a regular Linux or other Unix installation process* that attempted to set a default root password. It's a feature of pre-built images which are used on IoT gadgets.
* Pi distros are something of an exception being based on regular distros such as Debian but are pre-built images. Although the default password should be changed - and a non-root ID set up - ASAP but if that isn't done and the OS got banjaxed by something like this the device itself isn't affected, the SD card can be reloaded. Too bad about any user data on it, however.
"I checked a nearby competitor."
This is where the parking vultures are out to get you. Check and find the first one had the better offer but you incur a fine if you go back to their car park within a couple of days or whatever.
The trouble there is that car parking is really customer service but no doubt all siting negotiations are handled by estates or something with a similar title and they're more interested in their cozy relationships with landlords than avoiding having their customers being screwed over.
"Do they want me to assume they bring the same (lack of) competence to everything else they do?"
They may not want you to but it's a good idea to do so.
Item shown arriving at depot and never leaves - do they not raise regular exception reports for items that weren't despatched on time? Or items which, as I'm sure this did, "evaporate"?
And items which leave the despatch point en route for a locker and don't get put into the locker - don't they alert the courier before he moves on?
And when an item goes missing, do they not realise that despatching another PDQ is the proper way of dealing with it?
I assume these are all the result of agile development and one of these days they're going to get round to these user stories or whatever they're called but they didn't make the MVP.
Without it a lot of layers of management would be redundant. It's called job preservation. You might argue, of course, that it would be a much better way of cutting costs to take out those layers of management and allocate the front-line staff travel budgets.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
