Posts by why you delete my account?

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Re: It was only after the implementation began that they revealed that they couldn't.

Problem is (as others have alreeady stated in other comments) that while Agile might actually work and deliver (or at least do a better job of trying), the public sector is hamstrung by a legally mandated procurement process that all but prohibits it. Procurement process is often so long and complex that central govt. will often have changed colour and changed what local govt. is legally required to deliver before the project can even start.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: One update?

Problem is, you don't know what is or is not a "breaking change" in a library until you actually test it with your apps and your configuration.

IMHO "we changed the library API" is actually the easy one to deal with, it's the "we fixed the implementation and it shouldn't break anything but..." that is the harder one. Do you test everything, or do you upgrade and pray it doesn't break anything important and that it's the more reasonable (and less senior) users who find the issues? And what do you do if you test and somehting doens't work with new library version - start on the highway to dependency hell custom configuring installations or library loads, or ditch the upgrade and leave every app with a security vulnerability for the sake of one that may not even be exposed?

With snap / flatpack / whatever containerised installs you can legitimately hope that someone has tested the app with the library versions it ships with, and if there is one app that a library security fix breaks, then you can upgrade the others and maybe mitigate the threat to the problem one, without mucking around in dependency hell.

Which is worth more to you - the management and testing time or the memory / disk space ? There won't be one right answer for everyone or every scenario, it's a trade off and a debate that will run and run, in fact to me it's the same static vs. dynamic linking debate that has run ever since Linux got shared libraries (the old jump-table ones pre-ELF), just that these days the memory and disk usage at stake is a 2-3 orders of magnitude more.

BOFH: I care a lot ... about onion bhajis

Re: Mort and the unversal logic

You remember it wrong, it's:

"WE apologise for the inconvenience."

So, er, you just mis-pluralised God, oops...

Tesla owners win legal fight after software update crippled older Model S batteries

Re: Carbon neutral

> in-built inelligence to carry out collision avoidance, auto-braking, lane holding

Not sure how many horses you've actually ridden but in my experience the "built-in intelligence" tends to auto-detect a small bird flying out of a hedge, or a cat hiding in a hedge, as "large bear that's gonna eat me unless I bolt across all the road lanes and through a few fences". The auto-braking is shite - frequently gets confused with the driver-eject, especially when it involves fences and launch mode. The auto-pilot also tends to go where it wants to rather than where you want to - though if you always want to go to "the particularly nice looking patch of grass over there" you might be fine.

On balance though, I'd recommend you wait until the generation where they fit airbags, cos' they don't have them at the moment either...

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

200M quota as a student !? Pampered johnny-come-latelys.

Back in my day it was 2 Meg, 4 if you were very lucky and asked very very nicely. And don't even think about asking the BOFHs for more than 4...

Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020

Re: great OS, alas

> features, such as backing up and restoring your contacts, should you wish to migrate to another phone OS, are apparently not available

I have migrated multiple family members from old Lumias to Android and Apple and from my first hand experience this is nonsense. Migrating to android I can get contacts and text message history, to Apple I can only get contacts because iOS won't import texts (not WPs fault). In both cases WhatsApp message history can't be imported (although that may be possible with hacking iOS backups and some database work) - but again that isn't WPs fault, it's WhatsApp that refuses to backup and restore across OSes.

In every case, and for everything we needed to migrate, the Lumias provided readable backups - and to the SD card, not to the cloud.

My only problem is what to migrate my phone to when it either dies or I finally get fed up of providers removing their apps and simultaneously changing their web sites to not-work on WP. Because, having seen the other two choices that I have migrated the rest of the family to, I like neither :-(

Microsoft Dynamics 365 sandbox leaked TLS certificate's private parts

Re: To be fair...

>> Some people seem to have forgotten what "sandbox" means.

> Well, it doesn't mean "test",

In the context of dynamics CRM, MS states:

"Free Test instance and Paid Test instance types have been renamed to Sandbox instances."

this comes under "know your tools".

> unless this is MS once again ignoring what meaning of a word is agreed-on by the rest of the world

That would be the rest of the world excluding wikipedia and its editors, who also define it as "a testing environment" ?

Regardless, a more universal definition of sandboxes is that they are a secure place to play because keep stuff _in_ and stop it getting _out_ (and affecting "real" stuff). This is emphatically and completely different from being a secure place that stops stuff getting _in_. If in doubt as to the importance of understanding the difference, ask a lobster.

Re: To be fair...

> It is an issue because they decided to reuse one wildcard certificate for all customers.

For a test environment, not production. Some people seem to have forgotten what "sandbox" means.

Possibly MS should have made the domain(s) something like:

a.if-you-put-real-data-in-test-its-your-problem.operations.dynamics

b.if-you-put-real-data-in-test-its-your-problem.operations.dynamics

and so on, just to make it clear.

Yeah, Autonomy's ex-chief financial officer is still up for wire fraud

Re: That wasn't it......

> from an accountancy viewpoint you can't book it till the period in question

Under US GAAP standard or UK / International IFRS standards ? Also, under which year of standards? Revenue recognition in particular has been / is undergoing major changes in recent years - it is still (as far as I know) based on when the work is done (for service contracts) rather than when/if you get paid.

At the end of the day HP and/or the accountancy firm that did the due diligence didn't realise a UK-based UK-listed company didn't use US GAAP standards, well duh. There's always the possibility that Autonomy cooked the books by UK standards/law too, but SFO has closed that investigation due to finding insufficient evidence.

BOFH: That's right. Turn it off. Turn it on

Re: do not enter the hypen!

> credit card fields have EXACTLY 16 spaces in them. Not 15 nor 17.

AMEX card numbers (for just one example) are 15 digits. Not exactly 16...

If only someone (like ISO) had created a standard for card numbers so people didn't have to make up the spec and get it wrong every time.

> Sometimes, you just can't fix stupid.

Sometimes you can fix "didn't bother to read the standards", but mostly it just comes under stupid.