Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory 1465 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
Last time I tried Thunderbird, it sent an email while I was writing a draft. Seven times. Fortunately it wasn't anything serious, but I went back to Mac Mail after that. It may not be as feature rich as Thunderbird but at least it hasn't gone completely hatstand on me (yet).
Now if I were writing this as a work of fiction, I'd have lots of big executive bonuses, followed by another round of funding, more huge executive bonuses, and then - oh dear, the costs are way more expensive than we figured, time to go bankrupt, followed by executives disappearing to tropical regimes that have no extradition treaties...
I'm not suggesting for one second that that's what's happening here, of course, but after the whole Theranos thing I just can't help seeing grandiose expensive business plans like this without trying to work out an angle like that. Maybe I've been watching too much Better Call Saul...
The iPod classic was great. The nano was good, if a trifle buggy (especially if you're a last.fm addict, as I am, the fact that it sometimes just forgets what you played today is annoying).
The touch however, I could do without. The terrible Podcasts app I just find excruciating. iOS 6 handled it WAY better than anything afterwards.
If they're going to add it in, it has to be tested first. It's a new addition, just as the read/write NTFS support is new in Linux. It's going through the same system they always use for releasing new features. Why is it so bad that it isn't released yet? I'm having trouble identifying what you would want instead, as if they simply sent it out from dev to full release, I bet you would have several (correct) complaints about adequate testing.
Ah yes, Micros~1's testing system that seems to consist of
(a) release
(b) get bug reports
(c) close bug reports with snarky comments as to how users are using it in a way for which it wasn't intended
(d) sit down and have a cup of coffee with Satan.
I suspect there was a bug in it that they couldn't be bothered fixing, or some manager didn't like it. I mean, why would they change the habits of a lifetime by actually listening to user feedback, instead of either ignoring it or replying with a snidely worded piece that's just a longwinded way of saying "you're wrong"?
They're definitely not communists as Marx envisioned it, but then he had a pretty utopian vision in mind. Weirdly, he derides socialism for being this somehow out-of-touch fantasyland and then proceeds to go a step beyond. And yet, Robert Owen* got on the fiver** and he didn't. Quel surprise.
* a man I'd class as an actual socialist - unlike, for example, anyone who's ever been a head of state.
** or was it the tenner? It's a while back and I can't quite remember.
I find many people who claim to be Marxists, or who throw shade at Marxists, haven't actually read any Marx to begin with. (And nearly all regimes that claim to be "communist" or "Marxist" tend to use the word as window dressing for kleptocratic authoritarianism, much the same way as any country that uses "democratic" in its name does, but I digress)
You may disagree with some of his economic thinking (and I do), but his documenting of the working standards of the time (and especially of slavery) are hard to read.
I'm not quite sure what your issue is but I have the reverse.
The two Windows machines on my desk have fits over being connected to dual monitors on a regular basis, usually ending up in reboots, unplugging and replugging and a fair bit of swearing.
MacOs required a third party tool to stop the resolutions randomly changing.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, is just solid as a rock.
That said, Ubuntu is the only thing here running on a Lenovo, so maybe that's the common factor?
I love Vivaldi, personally. The email is a bit brutal but I do like it. Like you, I gave up on Thunderbird, not so much because I've found problems but just because it seems to be trying to do so much in the same program it's just silly. (Still not found anything half as good as my old Psion or Lotus Organizer, either).
Brave is nice but not too bad. I use it mainly for my RSS reader as it is a bit more hardcore about blocking trackers and so on.
Safari I still use for my online banking (and nothing else) because the banks seem to be a bit dim.
Chrome I use for testing websites for work. And sometimes Edge, if I can stand it.
Microsoft's behaviour with Edge shows that the Internet Explorer cases taught them only that you can just ignore any complaints about anti-competitive behaviour and just keep doing whatever you want because there's really no repercussions whatsoever.
Time to split them up, like they should have done in the first place. Four companies this time: cloud services, Office, Windows and other software, and massive financial penalties if any of the four give preferential treatment to any of the other three.
I remember once a colleague telling me about suggesting something open source to their manager:
"So, how much does it cost?"
"It's free"
"Ok, but who sets it up for us, what consultancy?"
"We can do it ourselves"
"But what if it goes wrong, who do we sue?"
"We don't."
"This sounds like pirate software to me, I'm not approving it. And if you suggest anything like this again, it'll be a written warning."
Has anyone complained? That's the key point with the EU I think, someone has to complain.
Still, I don't expect much will come from the Micros~1 probe for a very long time, and even then it'll be too little, too late. No more than a slap on one of the many tentacles MS uses to abuse its market position.
The first thought in my head was to detect anything reading and writing files continually. The problem there is that reading files continually is going to raise a false positive on (for example) an antivirus scan, while continually writing files is going to hit other things like encrypting disks and compressing files. And a way to mark that process as being safe to do what it's doing is going to be able to be commandeered by ransomware anyway.
I think these days browsers do actually allow you to reference the colour scheme using "magic numbers" - like Windows has constants such as &H8000000F, which refers to "button highlight" and will resolve to whatever colour you've set the highlight to. I suspect this is because a lot of them just pass the values through without checking them.
I guess we're going to need another browser option to ignore those constants somehow.
One side of me thinks rational, sensible changes to JavaScript would be appropriate and would help tremendously with the language.
The other side of me immediately goes "Microsoft? Does it smell a bit embrace-extend-extinguish in here or is it just me?"
As good as it looks, somehow I can't get it out of my mind that this large, wooden, horse-shaped object is just a little bit too conveniently gift wrapped...
Early on in my career I had a customer who bought something (WordPerfect? Works? can't remember) and it came with a demo of a desktop publisher program. They tried it out and rang us up in a fury because it printed "Demo" in big letters on every page.
They refused to believe it was a demo - after all, they were the original disks, why doesn't it work? - and asked for their money back, but only on the demo part. Eventually my boss managed to explain that it was a freebie, and got them to settle for him visiting them to uninstall it...
They have ID cards in most European countries, but the difference between the ones here and in the UK is that they aren't a vast, we-want-to-know-everything-about-you-and-put-it-in-one-central-database nonsense like they the UK was proposing.
I honestly can say in the eight or so years I've lived here I've actually used mine maybe three or four times (if you don't count checking my social security number off the back). Actually I've mainly used it so they could look me up on the COVID vaccination database because it also has my NHS number on it.
If they have to pay the same tax then they should get paid holiday, statutory sick pay, grievance procedures, proper HR policies to follow around termination.
Contractors get none of those.
That's the trade off - you either get paid more, or you get job security.
HMRC want to change that so contractors pay the same tax as the permanent employees, but without getting the same employment benefits.
Essentially, IR35 encourages all companies to make ALL roles contract ones. They still pay the same, they still have payroll to do and taxes to pay, they just don't have to worry about pesky employment legislation any more.
Anyone else thinking that WASM is starting to look like the new ActiveX? I'm just waiting for the security holes to all be found, followed by the panicked mass of "how to disable webassembly" posts, Vivaldi and Brave disabling it by default, and Norton releasing a wasm blocker*...
(Devil icon because I'm being part serious, part sarcastic)
* one that doesn't block their own crypto miner, natch...
I think the reason for requiring an MS account is the same as the way they're pushing Edge so hard... they feel that with the antitrust case so far behind them they can start trying to destroy all the other players in the market again. I'm not sure that, long term, this is such a sensible strategy.
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