Posts by Doctor Syntax 42414 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Cloud based services are so clearly the future"
And as the outages become more frequent their vendors will be able to say they were the future once upon a time. Anybody who can't see that coming needs to read the news and to have been around long enough to realise that IT is a fashion industry.
Way back in the days of plain old character terminals (the ones which were efficient for data entry - just use the keyboard and don't fumble with pointing devices) the function and arrow keys sent control strings. These were usually initiated by an ESC and the OS used the delay between that and the next character to work out whether it was just an ESC or a control string initiator. Cue a bit of delay on the network and the OS got it wrong so that the rest of the control string got sent into the program as data. That was rapidly followed by the accountant demanding to know why his staff were mis-entering data. ISTR there was some tuning available to lengthen the allowed interval so that got sorted.
Ubuntu favouring what looks for a moment like a progress bar but actually just whisks a short bar backwards and forwards until it's done.
KDE. The task bar can be set to autohide and restored by taking the mouse pointer to a user-chosen location. Make it the bottom edge and any attempt to take the mouse to the bottom of a window at the bottom of the screen brings up the task bar. Similarly going for the scroll bar on a window at the right hand edge. The bottom left corner seemed the most convenient but least likely place that you'd take the cursor by accident, the likeliest target there would be the menu button on the task bar itself. KDE 3 included corners as well as edges in its choices so that worked out well. KDE 4 restricted the choice to edges. WHY????
"Even better would be if they made the damn things easier to open after tearing them off the roll."
That was my point. The idiots who inflict these things on others will continue to be idiots until they're made to experience the consequences long enough for the problem to penetrate whatever they're using for brains.
1a Access their application via a 14000baud serial link for a day.
On a similar note the numpties who select the bags for packing vegetables in supermarkets should be obliged to spend an entire day packing them whilst wearing gloves and glasses which restrict their ability to focus closer than a metre.
@Dan 55
You'd be more convincing if you showed some sign of actually having used Linux. For a start you could tell us which particular GUI it is you're complaining about. Then you could show some indication that you know there are others. Bonus points for telling us which commercial UI you prefer and why.
"WORSE!!!! If you click the X to get rid of it the page you're wanting to be on jumps back to the top so that you have to scroll down and find where you had got to."
Worse still if you're reading it on MythTV where there's no way to click the sodding X. You're left squinting through a letter box shaped slot at the top of the screen. An the next breaking broken news thing comes up on the next page. And the next. And the next. A user friendly designer would say "If we show it a couple of times let's assume they've read it and really don't want to see it again". A really good designer would realise that after being displayed for a few seconds it can bee removed without even needing to click. Anybody from the Beeb reading this?
"I prefer to buy Kimodo Dragons & let them run wild through the place. If a boss gets uppity, a salesdroid shows up, or someone starts talking in buzzwords, feeding the remains to the Dragons is a great way of getting rid of the evidence."
You are the BOFH and I claim my £5.
"So your choices are glue or patience and a pellet gun."
One of my first jobs was with biological supplier mostly dealing with schools*. One of the products was dead rats for dissection. Over the years a few had escaped and they bred. The head of the microscope slide section decided to stay in one evening with a gun and potted one. Then he remembered rat blood often has trypanosomes and went to fetch a syringe intending to make up some slides. He should have taken the dead rat with him; by the time he got back the others had dragged it away, presumably to eat.
After a little while they went bust. They'd invested in making microscopes just at the time the Japanese were moving into the school microscope market. It must have been one of the receivers' odder jobs. There would have been some strange assets. One of the set items for A-levels that year was a bull's eye. For weeks I'd been visiting the slaughter house and come back with bags of bulls' eyes. The schools had got wind of the impending doom so hardly any ordered them. There was a big vat of them steeping in formalin.
*at the same time SWMBO was a teacher. She reckons we still owe her some dissecting scissors.
"This meant that my revenue was taking a big hit even before things like accountancy fees and my role in the company meant I had strange exclusions on expenses I could claim such as accommodation whilst on training courses and these exclusions changed year on year."
I never experienced that as a freelancer. When I was a Civil Servant years previously the exclusions seemed to change from expenses claim to expenses claim. It was part of the mean-spiritedness that prompted me to leave. No, folks, Civil Service jobs are not gold-plated, at least not in the scientific branch. Neither are the pensions.
"However, the issue of skills will only be exacerbated as thousands of tech contractors are set to leave the public sector amid a major crackdown on the tax freelancers pay via IR35."
I haven't been following HMRC's latest wheeze on this but AIUI it will be up to departments in the Civil Service to determine the status of contracts. If so then departments have the solution in their own hands. They can insist on contracts which they can certify as being non-caught. If HMRC insist on doing things differently their loss will be other department's gain.
Why does every product manager, marketroid and sales person think their product sales are crowing exponentially? They're not. They're on a sigmoid curve. And that's a sigmoid curve of the total number of devices in use. In time the sales are bound to drop off and the only sales will be for replacements.
It's happened to PCs, it's happening to tablets.
Expect it and be prepared to move on.
"the only mutual I could see offering a current account was Cumberland BS."
Unfortunately they don't have a branch near me. The only financial institution, mutual or not, left with a branch in my preferred location is now YBS and the idiots, instead of realising what an advantage they had with their Norwich and Peterborough current account and rolling it out to the other brands, decided to scrap it.
Looking to move from the Co-op the best branch available to me now is Santander. I'm really encouraged about their online competence - I clicked on a link on their site and got a 404.
"No - the reference to "TUPE" in the article means the Transfer of Undertaking (Protection of Employment) Regulations, 1981. In essence, it means the contract with the old employer is deemed to be the contract of the new one - starting date included."
I take it you're responding to the previous comment regarding IR35. That comment refers to freelance contractors. Freelancers' employers are their own companies. The do not want to suddenly find themselves employed by a company to whom their previous client has transferred an undertaking (grim term!).
"The prize here is the chance to convert those running UNIX on the Power, RISC and Itanium systems often used in the most resilience-hungry computing environments."
If I were a sysadmin running on one of those environments I'd not be as easily tempted by Linux as I once was. Linux seems to be moving away from being a Unix lookalike. I'd be more interested in a BSD. OTOH I'm not sure about the extent to which commercial S/W has been ported such as the proprietary databases I'd probably still be running.
