Posts by Zippy´s Sausage Factory 1466 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
"What are you going to do about the waiting lists, health secretary? Hire more doctors? Train more nurses? Build more hospitals?"
"Er... well first, we're going to upgrade Word."
"And what are you going to do next?"
"Well not much really. I mean, that should sort it, shouldn't it?"
So am I. I hide the ribbon and move the "quick access toolbar" down below it and voila - a proper actual toolbar so MS Office feels like it's for grownups again and not a "Fisher Price*" interface.
* actually, scrap that. Given their track records, Fisher Price would undoubtedly come up with a UI that was cheerful, well organised, much easier to use, and less confusing. Maybe they should start writing software...
I've used spreadsheets right back to CalcStar, and I can still happily say that Excel is the worst of them for crashing, mangling data and being downright annoying and unintuitive. (Older, crashier versions of Lotus 1-2-3 being second). The fact that charts are now almost impossible to work with in Excel whereas they're still easy in LibreOffice makes it a no brainer for me.
The only Excel feature I miss anywhere is the keyboard shortcuts for today's date and time.
MS always seem to have a "good release", "bad release" thing going on with Windows. (And other things, TBH).
Windows NT 6 - loved
Windows 2000 - not too many happy with it
Windows XP - everyone liked this
Windows Vista - almost nobody liked this
Windows 7 - again, pretty popular
Windows 8 - I don't know anyone didn't hate this
Windows 10 - a definite improvement over Windows 8, if not Windows 7
Windows 11 - not seen it yet but I suspect it'll be another Vista...
Reminds me of a time way back when a colleague was trying to kill a rogue process, traced it back to its root and cheerfully did "kill -9 1".
Almost immediately the penny dropped, and was rapidly followed by a facepalm heard all the way across the office.
Fortunately the system was back up five minutes later and as it was already running slowly we just told everyone it was overloaded and had crashed and nobody seemed to think that was out of the question.
"the team at Microsoft is relatively responsive to feedback – according to the feedback site, Visual Studio 2022 closed 1,177 requests"
My experience of them closing requests is usually "not enough people voted, we're not doing it*", "too hard, can't be bothered*" or "that's how it works, suck it up buttercup*".
I suppose saying that's responsive is technically correct. It's just the type of response that I find dispiriting.
* my paraphrasing, not the actual words, obvs
Of course it is. GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and they've long been against anybody doing anything, anywhere that they're not paying somebody for (and, for preference, that someone should either be Microsoft, or someone Microsoft can claim an intermediary fee from).
That's just the nature of capitalism though, sadly.
Well here in Portugal I see vintage typewriters for sale with the "tecladio nacional" layout - HCESAR! (to be precise, the first line was _ HCESAROPZ, the second ?QTDINULMX and the third YÇJBFVGKW)
Some day, I intend to buy a cheap keyboard for 10€, swap all the keycaps around, and then write a keyboard driver for it and see how it goes. Yes, I know it feels masochistic - hence the icon.
So let's see... I'm developing away, and I need to clear the cookies for my development site so I can test logging in.
Now... I can't?
This is somewhat of a dumb decision. A little bit like removing the dishwasher from your kitchen in case the cat sleeps in it and you don't notice before switching it on. Yes, there's a possibility things can go wrong, but it's going to require someone being really dumb to make it happen...
Because it's coming from every country in the world, whether we like it or not. Russia and China have similar laws, and I expect the EU will follow suit soon. So as not to lose sight of the data, the "five eyes" countries will do the same, as I'm sure will the other nine that make up the "fourteen eyes".
Which, of course, will mean the end of any possible challengers to Facebook et al, as nobody will have the money...
"Meta's bounty program for these datasets only offers payments to reporters' preferred charities – lest scrapers report their own work for monetary gain."
That's going to work so well. I mean, after all, it's not like security researchers have bills to pay, is it? It's like Sherlock Holmes, they just work for the fun of it. </sarcasm>
I would ask how they could be so dumb, but to be honest, nothing surprises me any more. I think I need a lie down...
What's the betting this gets used in court. Someone says "someone deleted from our log file... must be hackers" and uses the AI to "rebuild" the log files. Those get submitted in court, and of course because it's AI and it's a computer it "never makes a mistake".
I mean OK this is a bit of slippery slopeism and it probably says more about my cynical worldview than anything, but as usual we have to be careful with AI and remember that it isn't really intelligent, it just pretends to be.
Anyway, I'm off to go and hide in my cupboard. Might do a bit of moaning and wailing later, if I feel in the mood. (Gnashing of teeth is a luxury I reserve for the weekends).
Why does reading this article immediately made me think of "Millicent" (DEC's failed plan to replace web advertising with micropayments), or "Brave Rewards"?
Bringing "the power of blockchain to the web"? Of course, a more sinister version of that might be that every page view is recorded in the website's blockchain, so the entire world can see who read what web page, forever?
I don't see that Web3 is any more than a marketing gimmick for those selling cryptocurrencies and I want no part of it. Some might say I'm cynical because my meagre investment in cryptocoins has so far failed to make me a millionaire, and to those people I would like to say that I was already cynical to begin with and it can't have made it much worse...
The only thing I expect from the UK government is that they do as much as they possibly can to undermine GDPR. And then they'll whine when the EU says that British businesses need to be GDPR compliant to trade in the EU, but there we are.
We need an "I am so very very tired of this nonsense" icon...
That's the tricky part to me. If your insurer can unilaterally decide that any specific cyber attack is state-sponsored and therefore an act of war, that's troubling, as it's basically a "get out of jail free" card they can play every time they like.
I can understand that if they insure against war, then the whole system goes down if there is one. The tricky bit is finding a definition of what a "cyber war" actually is, without invoking SkyNet and Terminators...
Maybe the folks at Microsoft wonder why Notepad++ exists?
As someone who never uses Dark Mode personally, I'm wondering why, exactly, people get so excited about it. Surely Dark Mode is just "High Contrast" mode but with better PR?
And Windows 11 styling? If I want something that looks like MacOS 9, I know where to find SheepShaver...
I've always had my suspicion that cloud services are all about locking the customers in as tightly as possible and then turning the thumbscrews to get them to cough up the dough.
After all, this whole "on premises" thing they've had for years where they can buy their own hardware and just run it without any monthly fee really gives a billionaire sleepless nights, you know? Luxury yachts don't buy themselves...
I think the idea of moving to proof of stake rather than proof of work is interesting - Shiba Inu, for example, has every possible coin already mined and in circulation already (which is probably why it's worth so little).
But other than that I don't see much else other than a kind of get rich quick scheme in some ways. (And yes, I own quite a few coins, and no, they're not making me rich)
Er, I think you might be mixing apples and oranges here.
The four freedoms apply to source code, to the ability to develop and distribute your own software based on others work.
What they're trying to prevent is people like me having a decaffeinated moment and typing rm -rf * at the root directory and then screaming in panic when they realise what they've just done.
So I can easily imagine a "DontDeleteStuffYouShouldntByAccident" package being GPL... at least until Skynet becomes self-aware, starts listening to The Cure and then decides to delete itself, that is.
So the cloud is coming back to being on premises, and we're back in vendor lockin again.
Does anyone else see a parallel with the transition from mainframe timesharing to minicomputers? It's the cycle of reinvention I suppose.
It's like deja vu, all over again as Yogi Berra might say. History may not be repeating, but it sure does rhyme.
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