Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"It shows that they really don't understand their business at all."
Even to a non-coffee drinker such as myself this is the obvious conclusion.
It's one that is all too common:
- What's the nature of your business?
- We sell ProductX
In many cases that's wrong. The business provides a service which sells ProductX. The services is provided by people, not AI or some automated machine. Even if AI or some automated machine provides ProductX the service is provided by people.
"If the script is over 50 lines long it should have been written in a proper high level language."
There used to be a mantra which ran something like:
Never do in C what you could do in ark
Never do in akw what you could do in sed
Never do in sed what you could do in tr
Never do in tr what you could do in shell
"Autres temps, autres mœurs"
It hasn't been legally safe to use such services for personal data since GDPR, even worse since the CLOUD Act but maintaining trade with the US meant that it suited the arm of the EU that handled that sort of thing to pretend it was and keep inventing privacy fig-leaves even as each one was torn off in court actions. Now that pretence is no longer needed.
As these things come under closer scrutiny in the EU HMG is going to have to be careful not to lose equivalence or the UK's interests could also be impacted.
"If you need a long flow of slides behind you to say what you are meant to be telling the audience, you aren't telling the audience properly."
That's bad. OTOH you might have a long flow of slides which you explain to the audience - actual photographic slides, not text. I used to have a carousel of slides illustrating all sorts of things - altered documents, comparison microscopy, footprints etc. I could pick that up, collect a projector and give different talks depending on the audience, anything from schools to detective training.
PowerPoint and Impress certainly make it too easy to put the text of the talk on the screen; what's on the screen should really be something to talk about.
It depends on what's meant by that. Individual LibreOffice applications are calls to a common executable with a flag to tell it whis functionality the user wanted. He might simply be catching up with that but it would likely be a complete rewrite. Something for Office users to look forward to.
I'd read it as saying that platforms have at most a year to implement it but nothing to say it can't be done in less than that. So if Trump is so keen Truth Social should be up and running with it PDQ. And maybe X so as to oblige his wishes. So they should be open for takedown requests Real Soon Now.
I'm not sure I'd put too much weight on names given to versions unless they were specifically asked. If Angular started as Angular.js it might still be that in respondents' minds irrespective of what version they're actually running - "Oh, yes, Angular.js version 19 now you ask".
What would be interesting to know is how the various distros are used. Are they, for instance, running Ubuntu on the desktop and Debian or CentOS on the server?
One impression I get is that in many cases the Linux systems were set up by somebody else who's moved on, maybe a vendor, and have been inherited by people who just know how to keep them going. Because they just keep going, there's nobody tasked with planning replacement or even what to do in an emergency. It all Just Works so it's allowed to drift, run updates, take backups, maybe manage user IDs, It really is saving money.
"the plan by Amazon to itemize the effects the tariffs have on product prices"
That's going to be problematic for marketplace orders fulfilled direct from China because nobody - not even Trump - will know what the tariff will be when it's delivered. The only way round that is going to be to order at list price and collect the tariff (plus handling) on delivery and it would certainly be necessary to display a message to that effect on the listing. good luck with keeping that hidden from the customer.
Perhaps I should pass on some of the emails I get from people with impeccably Anglo-Saxon names offering all sorts of skills such as web-site development, mobile development, webapps etc. They arrive at the same address as the emails telling me Elon Musk says I shouldn't pay my electricity bill and always from gmail addresses.
I'm wondering if my daughter had an in-person interview given that the company is almost entirely remote working - she certainly hadn't seen the UK office then and I'm not sure whether she's seen it now or even if it exists. It would certainly be unacceptable to use anything other than company computers for the information she handles.
A) The Polish name might well be from a US citizen.
B) I'm not familiar with the IT industry in Poland but doubt that it would be "outer" in any other respect than it not being in the US.
C) If a job advert is placed globally then a response is as likely to come from Poland as elsewhere without specifically seeking out "outer" countries. OTOH it does, at the cost of the risk of finding a Nork, extend te talent pool.
I suppose a return to office police does protect against this specific problem as well as protecting against finding the widest choice of talent.
"And you're unwilling to invest a couple of grand at that final interview stage as part of your due diligence?"
Who's the "you" in this. Obviously it should be the business but more likely the "you" wanting to perform due diligence as the recruiting manager doing the interviews is not necessarily the "you" who's the beancounter unwilling to invest in travel or the "you" who's the bum-on-seat counter requiring return to office.
"The very problem of Linux is that FOSS is at the very root of enshittification. You get software whichi is not paid by users, so it's not develooped for the end users - but those paying its development."
Arse about face.
Commercial S/W needs to have something new to keep selling. Windows was pretty good about W2K. Replacement and growth of the global PC fleet would have kept sales going but there's more growth if refresh can be forced so there was an unholy alliance between Microsoft & H/W vendors - new "must have" OS needed bigger and better H/W and the bigger and better H/W came with a new licence.
And who can forget the enforced Office upgrade via new file formats.
Then there are all the other up-sell tricks, the EOL that forces new purchases.
None of the commercial development takes place because the developers want to use it - it takes place to have something different to force onto the user base. Once there's a monopoly a vendor can force whatever they want onto the market.
This is why you get enshittification of commercial S/W.
FOSS isn't interested in selling anything. There are no commercial pressures to force anything fresh into the market.
But, hey, I recognise the technique. Attribute your principal's worst failings to the other side.
"Most people will put up with telemetry, ads, and bad design choices long before they'll take on a system that needs technical know-how, constant tinkering, and a fair bit of learning."
As far as I'm concerned it's Windows that needs the technical know-how, constant tinkering and a fair bit of learning so why put up with the telemetry, ads and bad design choices.
I don't use a rolling distro. I don't even use supposedly user-friendly distros such as Ubuntu or derivatives such as Mint - I suspect Ubuntu has been over-tweaked in order to be promoted. came to realise that something as unassuming as Debian, and subsequently Devuan, were far more straightforward and Just Work.
As per another post up-thread there was a time when it was fun to tinker with computers and Linux was (and still is if you want it to be) a tinkerer's platform and Windows was a workhorse. Personally the tinkering urge has been grown out of, the Windows workhorse has aged badly and is well overdue for a visit to the knackers and Linux, at the non-tinkering end of the spectrum, has matured into the workhorse.
"As a 40 year old I grew up on a C64, then DOS and Win 3.x, NT3.x"
While you were playing with your toys some of us were using Unix in production systems and watched Windows develop as a Johnny-come-lately mess. We didn't have to make a personal journey from Windows, we just had to wait for Linux to mature.
The main reason I'm using Linux today is because Microsoft encouraged SCO, which used to be my laptop OS, to commit suicide in fighting Linux in the courts instead of cutting its prices whilst competing on quality. At one point SCO was one of the main platforms for small businesses so it's no wonder that Microsoft offered to hold its coat while it got itself into a fight with IBM.
Let me enlarge on that. If you want some form of service for shared storage you have, of course, run and SMB server on prem. You can also run a WebDav server (e.g. NextCloud) instead which, depending on the care you take, be rather less easily hit then an SMB server if you have the misfortune to be hit with malware.* If you don't want to run a NextCloud server you can find a number of services who will run one for you without having to deal with a mega-corp.
* The semantics of storing data on an SMB server are similar to those of a local drive - that's the point of SMB. The semantics of WebDav are different so assuming you don't also but unnecessarily expose the server via SMB the malware shouldn't be able to install itself on the server and as the v of Webdav stands for "versioning" you should be able to get your last version back.
