"Excel rules all software for all time, QED."
Was that you using Excel as a todo list in the recent story about the migration that went well? (As in down the well).
33074 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"amend the act to included the safe guards that any data retained can only be accessed on the production of a Judge's court order."
Not enough. Amend the act so that the data can only be retained on the production of a Judge's order. The objectionable part of this is that it disregards the presumption of innocence.
"I really don't understand why the Government just does not go back and amend the act to included the safe guards that any data retained can only be accessed on the production of a Judge's court order."
The problem lies not with the access but with retaining the data in the first place. In principle the assumption is that you're guilty and it's just a procedural matter. In practical terms you're relying on the likes of TalkTalk to keep it safe. In financial terms you're also dumping the costs of it on your ISP who will then dump it on you.
"European judgments resulting from appeals cases can't be considered to have an effect in the UK until a British judge has observed them."
But wasn't this referred to the ECJ by the High Court? That means that this one has already landed back with a British judge.
Also, it's not entirely a matter for UK courts. The ruling must surely affect what's acceptable under the GDPR. If a post Brexit govt wants UK businesses to be able to handle personal data of EU customers - and there would be a serious economic impact if they couldn't - then UK businesses must be capable of meeting GDPR.
"I am actually at a loss to say which one is worse."
You don't remember the times when people used to queue to get the latest version of Windows? Actually 95 was a major step forward, at least in terms of versions built on top of DOS. They put together a lot of stuff that had been around in terms of UI over the previous few years and hit a sweet spot with it. There's a good argument that the overall trend form that time has been down. They also incorporated a lot of stuff from HP's New Wave which, if you ran it over W3.x, made a big improvement in usability. And this from someone who is considerably less than Microsoft's greatest fan.
"A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is not the equivalent of a hand grenade with the pin pulled out."
Nevertheless they are banned from flights. So if it actually had been a SGN7 the plane would have been flying with a banned object on board. That is a serious state of affairs and I'd expect there would have been repercussions for the airline for doing this. That Smooth Newt considers it safe would not be a relevant factor.
"Why do they think that having every damn Office control in the "ribbon" so that the user is stuck in a forest of menu items they'll never use is better than some kind of customisable menu ( with a simple way to bring everything back if you need it)."
I suspect the answer to that is lock-in.
In the ?good old days MS could bring out a new version of Office which would default to writing files the older versions couldn't read so everyone had to buy upgrades because they needed to open those documents and spreadsheets.
Then those terrible people at the Document Foundation pulled a nasty on them. They got their formats made an ISO standard and the big purchasers - i.e. govts. - like specifying support of standards. So they then had to get a standard of their own, a story of its own but not for here.
Having to support their own standard they couldn't play their old games any longer to force upgrades. What was worse, they were having to compete with free and, given that their interface followed fairly standard lines the free competition wasn't that difficult to migrate to for users.
So they changed the UI. All the old users hated being forced to migrate but from MS's perspective this was for the greater good. In the fullness of time there was a new cohort of users who'd been taught the new interface in "CS" lessons in school (Microsoft loves to support education) and if they then joined organisations that had migrated to Open/LibreOffice they found the old-style interface just as difficult as the older users found the ribbon and that introduced pressure to migrate back to MS.
LibreOffice, however, is now fighting back with a move to support for multiple interfaces so that either style can be accommodated. https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/
" it's impossible to argue away the fact that Microsoft don't ever seem anymore to build software that intuitively suits the ordinary user and makes life easier, or even makes any kind of logical sense."
Sadly Microsoft don't have a monopoly on that. It's these UX experts who get everywhere like a plague of mice. They decide they know what one thing you want to do and tailor the UI to that and only that. The fact that you want to ten other things hasn't occurred to them and the fact that you might want to do at least one of those others at the same time is utterly beyond them (they've been brought up on mobile devices that have tiny screens where you can only do one thing at a time). So they build something that needs full screen to work and their lobotomised UI now makes it a pain, if not right down impossible, to do some of the other things you wanted to do.
"The 'Start' menu is literally a Microsoft invention, right down to the (lamentable and inevitable) patents, so I don't see how UNIX had had it for quite some time."
The single start menu is. CDE had multiple menus. Consolidating them was a stem forward but not wildly inventive.
"The same capability had been available for UNIX systems for quite some time."
The standard Unix offering of the time was CDE which I used a lot under its HP guise, VUE. It featured a whole series of pop-up menus. Reducing that to one produced a much tidier interface. Gnome, for some reason, didn't quite take the hint with the default there, as I recall, being two. My preference has always been for Unix or Unix-like systems and my preferred UI is KDE but MS did, I think, move UI forward at the time.
"The Windows 95 user interface was widely recognized as superior to anything else available."
I agree. It was certainly based on a lot of ideas and features that had been around for a long time. Those included CUA and HP's New Wave (the copyright declarations included HP). However, they put it all together in a slicker interface than I'd seen elsewhere. In recent years they then seem to have brought in UX designers who've concentrated on throwing away as much of that as they could.
What you haven't worked out is that highways, postal services, etc. are infrastructure. So, in effect, are Google etc. At some point you have to stop and think what duty of care do operators of infrastructure have?
Should they police in detail who gets to use them and how; should, for instance, the water undertaking decide that only non-terrorists get anything coming out of their taps?
Or should their duty of care be limited to ensuring that the system runs smoothly and delivers what its users ask?
And if you think the former could you please present us with a detailed plan of how it should be done because I'm sure the rest of us would like to be enlightened. Your detailed plan should explain how it would avoid the situation where Facebook caught flack for taking down that iconic image of the napalm girl that was so influential in its day. Using algorithms to deal with the complexities of human culture might be a tad more difficult than you think.
"the blocking mechanism is sometimes used to disable copies of the software once the buyer has asked for a refund. Thus, we're told, it is difficult for HRD Software to know exactly how many keys have been cancelled for legit reasons or out of retaliation"
They can't match up refunds with keys blocked because of them? Really?
"An investigation by the perennially under-resourced pool discovered"
The investigation found the list of servers apparently compiled in from a library on Github, a library from which they have now been removed in the current version.
What sort of eejit compiles in stuff like that? Haven't they ever heard of configuration files?
"If they were lukewarm about it, why take it to the Supreme Court?"
Oh, no, not again!
Read the very first part of Article 50. Go on, Google it now and read it. Look, seeing as you probably CBA, here's the link: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2016/577971/EPRS_BRI(2016)577971_EN.pdf Now read it.
Still CBA? Here's the relevant passage: 1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
Now you tell me, what are the UK's constitutional requirements for this - and what's your authority for that?
You see, it's unprecedented. HMG think Royal Prerogative provides the requirement. But we've spent over a third of a millennium - that's right, right back to the Civil Wars in the 1640s - establishing something called the sovereignty of Parliament. Some people think that means Parliament's decision is the constitutional requirement.
The way to resolve this, the only way, is to get the decision of the courts. ATM the decision of the High Court is in favour of Parliament. HMG have appealed to the Supreme Court where it will be decided once and for all.
Whilst my own view is in favour of Parliament making the decision I still think it right that the matter should have gone to the Supreme Court because we really do need a definitive decision.
Consider, for instance, the situation if Article 50 was invoked irrespective of whether it was by Her Majesty May using the Royal Prerogative or Parliament passing an Act without a ruling. Brexit will inevitably cause expense - redundancies etc - for those corporations who have set up in the UK because it gave them an EU base. Suppose one or several of them were then to demand a Judicial Review on the basis that the constitutional requirement wasn't met. Can you imagine the chaos it would cause?
Do you now see why it's important to get this settled now irrespective of whether you think Brexit is the best thing since sliced bread or a mistake that's going to cost swathes of its supporters their livelihoods?