Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The one paying to have the phone call made are ignoring the fact that is has a contrary effect on the way their products are percieved and the company selling the phone call will certainly not reveal that fact."
You have just described the entire advertising industry and the marketing departments that pay them.
"Probably because there's no way they can really know. In this example"
The whole problem with their business model is that they're taking money for something for which they should take responsibility which they find difficult to do. Their response to the Irish incident suggests they expected to get away with doing nothing.
It's their problem and we should hold them responsible for solving it. If they can't or won't then their entire business deserves to go down the tubes for being built on an unsustainable model.
"if...Microsoft provides (or offers to provide on demand) the full sources for the kernel version in question, including any customizations they may have made."
That's a bit of a question. The article says We're told people will eventually be given instructions and code on GitHub to roll their own WSL 2 kernels, if the supplied 4.19 one doesn't float your boat. but what does 'eventually' mean? Does it mean when they ship it (and the article says they're shipping it on the Insider programme already) or at some indeterminate time in the future?
"IT bureaucracies that seek to have someone else to blame when things go bad"
Having someone to blame isn't the same as having someone to fix it. Either the bureaucracy does that itself or, given that it would be too much like hard work, outsources it. They're unlikely to outsource it to Microsoft but to a third party. The stupid thing is, of course, that the Windows supporting third party can't really go beyond what their latest MS certification course taught them whilst the FOSS-supporting third party can actually look at the source code. It ways more about the stupidity of large bureaucracies with more interest in off-loading blame than in supporting their employers.
"There is also constant pressure to make the software available on Windows... perhaps because it would allow the software to be used in university teaching labs"
What an indictment of University teaching labs.
"everyone here who has relatives running Linux keeps a good eye on them and is ready to sort out issues."
People here who have relatives running Linux have them doing so because it's a damn sight easier keeping an eye on them doing that than when they were running Windows.
Please get that into your head: the Linux option is easier.
I could visualise a switch where the legacy windows applications run under a real Windows Subsystem for Linux, i.e. a Linux kernel with a Windows compatibility layer and, of course, a proprietary UI. But although there would be a legacy support its real purpose would be as a client to all the Microsoft services. Not making people ponder whether they still need Azure etc but making sure they do need it all.
"The reason I and people like me use Linux is not about money, it's about control"
In my case it's because it runs a Unix-like user land. I really don't see the need to carry a Windows overburden to do that.
I do remember that in the old days Microsoft actually had their own Unix port, Xenix, and at the time it was fine. There was no indication of Microsoft wanting to apply EEE. Possibly it was a matter of them wanting their own server OS at a time when Netware dominated the X86 server world. When it no longer suited them they turned it over to their major distributor, SCO. Inititally the SCO product was also fine. There was even a specialist market in PC boards to facilitate various aspects of running SCO such as multiple serial port boards for character terminals. It was much later when that went to pot.
Often the case with big corporations is that the corporation itself isn't necessarily bad, it's the fact that they can change top management and be taken in totally different directions.
I can't help feeling that there's always going to be an advantage in being someone who knows several areas in detail rather than overspecialising. On the one hand you have value in being possibly the only one able to connect several of those silos to work together when they they need to and on the other you're not stranded when one of the areas goes out of fashion. OTOH you do have the advantage over someone who has sketchy knowledge of everything.
"HR also regularly sends out announcements by sharing a link to Google Docs."
HR and marketing - the weakest points in any organisation*. They'll only send out this crap indistinguishable from phishing if they don't know what's wrong with them and if they don't know what's wrong with them they'll have know inhibitions in falling for incoming.
* Apart from senior management, of course.
"XTAL's attempt to file for bankruptcy before the trial court could end. If the company succeeded, it could sell off its intellectual property – even if it featured chunks of ASML's code."
I can't imagine much success if the property was largely at risk of being invalidated by the ongoing court case.
"Write your destructive code so that it includes testing the condition that it is running where you intended it to run, before performing the destruction"
Which is another reason for doing it in a script. First write a SELECT* using the WHERE and HAVING clauses and run that. Only once your sure it returned what you expected do you edit that to the UPDATE or DELETE you intended. With a BEGIN at the front, of course.
*Just getting a count might be sufficient.
"Of course a script would be a more permanent solution, but sometimes you just have to run SQL on the production server."
In which case you do it in a script. It doesn't have to be a permanently saved. Your script starts with BEGIN TRANSACTION. You run the script then - and only then - your type your COMMIT.
It's a production database, belt and braces are not amiss.
*It never fails to boggle my mind the number of posts online about "I've found a cheaper O2 sensor that seems to work" or "I use a different kind of CO2 scrubber that isn't actually rated to go in rebreathers and none of the major manufacturers have ever tested on but it's cheaper so I'll use it".
Nobody ever posts "I tried it and it didn't work"? They must all work.
In the meantime, remember the saying "either go to sea with one compass or three."
"Senior company leadership was not involved in the review and first became aware of this issue in the aftermath of the Lion Air accident,"
For some minute value of 'leadership'.
This seems to be a management insistent on getting what it likes to hear instead of what it needs to hear. One thing it needs to hear is "when you're in a hole, stop digging.".
"In Rightpondia, manufacturers they can write whatever they want in the T&Cs but within the bounds of legality,"
The legality can depend on whether the transaction falls within consumer protection. I'd imagine a sale of a tractor to a farmer wouldn't. However in Rightpondia the tractor market is competitive so such shenanigans might amount to shutting up shop. If it wasn't they'd result in an anti-trust investigation.
There's an alternative line of attack. If the manufacturer doesn't want buyers to repair kit they bought, they, the manufacturers, repair it themselves (through agents if they prefer) at their own cost for the life of the item, life being as long as the kit physically exists. IOW a permanent warranty. Suddenly allowing right to repair might sound like a good idea.
"Given how alike family members can sound and given the quality of the average phone line"
I've recently had a few phone conversations with a cousin for the first time in years and it's amazing how like her mother she sounds. I'd be surprised if the system could tell them apart.
In passing I discovered that mailname@hotmail.com doesn't go to the same mailbox as mailname@hotmail.co.uk. I'd assumed they would and the fact that it isn't seems to open the door to impersonation without faffing with UTF look-alike characters.
"The charges were always dubious, which is why they never interviewed Assange in London..... And they never actually charged Assange with anything."
And there was me supposing that it was because Assange was in the Ecuadoran embassy. Are you telling me he wasn't fleeing anything but had gone to see about a tourist visa, got lost and couldn't find his way out for 9 years?
Remember there was no extradition warrant out from the US, just Sweden.
"I understand that it is distressing for genuine victims but allowing people to make false allegations just creates a new set of victims."
False allegations also make it more difficult for real victims. That was the case 40 years and more ago and no doubt still is. It looks as if we've been through a period where allegations were looked at less sceptically than previously and that resulted in a number of cases collapsing so we're now seeing a reaction to that.
Where a couple of spammers include real email addresses themselves you can always try sending one of them an email referring them to your colleague with the other address. After all, it'd be rude not to introduce them to each other after they've introduced themselves to you.
The other option is to have an email address just for such logins which is set to bounce. It's a variation of having a specific email address for specific companies - booking.com springs to mind for no particular reason - which is set to bounce as soon as a transaction has been acknowledged.
BTW is SEO spam still a thing? It seems to have tapered off since I started replying with my SEO self-assessment list.
Which is, of course, the last thing part of the email that you'll read because it's at the end.
It's just occurred to me that there might be a link to top-posting here. Do top-posters expect their emails to be read from the bottom upwards so that the reader will have got the context before reaching their pearls of wisdom?
I started in FORTRAN with coding sheets. When it came to making changes the most convenient way was to come in in the evenings when the data-prep teams had gone home and users could use the card punches. Eventually some card punches were made available for users during the day.
He pointed out that typing and them printing them in anticipation of sending them at a later date would create "all kinds of problems" – not least that none of them would have a sent date.
I'd have thought that not having a sent date on unsent emails really would have been the least of the problems.
