Posts by logicalextreme

5G mast set aflame in leafy Liverpool district, half an hour's walk from Penny Lane

Re: @Cedric

When I say it doesn't hold up well to scrutiny, I mean in the same way that the concept of race pretty much falls apart as soon as you start looking at trying to define it with any degree of determinism. We use two easy categories which are mighty handy for various purposes, but it's a distinction that we've made because the chromosomal distinctions are far greater (and it can't always come down to genitals, because nature has pretty much done everything you can think of with everything you can think of!).

I was thinking along medical lines but as you rightly point out there's sexual reproduction as well. Male and female is good for those purposes, near as I can tell. There may well be further uses for the finer distinctions within each biological sex but I don't know; I'm not in any way knowledgeable on such matters.

Re: @Cedric

Sex being a biological/medical categorisation and gender being a social or societal one.

I'm not sure which "Oxford dictionary" you refer to, but my 2003 reprint of the 2nd edition Oxford Dictionary of English clearly highlights the chief usage of each of the words in the two definitions, and they match how I use them. This may be different in the OED, admittedly, but I don't have a billion pounds to spend on either the getting-on-a-bit print edition or the online version. I'm not sure whether the corpus would have reflected those usages in the same way in 1989 but it's likely that it does now if it did in 2003.

The rest of your post is actually in agreement with me and others, and nobody's said anything about telepathy. As I'm sure you're aware, a given word is defined by its usage, not by a dictionary — dictionaries will always by definition (sorry) be playing catch-up. But I can see that the distinction has been in at least one dictionary for at least 17 years, so try and be happy that you know this now! I have to admit as a bit of a pedant I'm usually delighted to find out I've been accidentally conflating terms or using words "incorrectly", cause then I can go correcting people myself.

I apologise for my initial tone, I honestly assumed you were aware of the distinction in usage and were just rocking the boat. That's my bad.

While I freely admit that there has been a resurgence of predominantly attention-seeking identity politics making headlines for the past few years, you're just wilfully feigning ignorance of the distinction between sex and gender here.

Sex remains what it always has been; a vaguely convenient shorthand for categorising some biological differences within species that doesn't hold up super-well under scrutiny but is usually good enough for the purposes it's used for.

cmd.exe is dead, long live PowerShell: Microsoft leads aged command-line interpreter out into 'maintenance mode'

Re: Microsoft only have themselves to blame

The idea is to make it as close to unambiguous as possible what a command is going to do. There's also an element of consistency and thus predictability. So for the most part a command/cmdlet/function/whatever should be in the form Verb-Noun, with the verb picked from a pre-approved list, and each parameter should be explicitly qualified rather than relying on positional parameters.

In this way it means it's extremely easy to sanity-check a sysadmin script before running it. However it does mean that no matter how good PS is at sysadmin stuff, it straight-up sucks as a programming language. And all of the consistency and predictability that sticking to certain coding standards will earn you is completely trashed by the actual language itself acting like a spoiled brat with undiagnosed ADHD whose main purpose in life seems to be to violate the Principle of Least Astonishment from as many different angles and in as many different ways as possible. When used as a programming language, and especially if you expect it to behave like a "proper" one, it's probably one of the most dangerous things I've seen in my career (which is admittedly not a long one, nor something I would call a career).

The verbosity, though, means you can actually usually take a correct guess at the command you're after, and its parameters, without having to Google what you're attempting to achieve. This is one of the few things I think is interesting-in-a-good-way about PS.

Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes

Re: Funny that

Changing the batch separator in SQL Server Management Studio from GO to SELECT has caught out every database professional, no matter how seasoned, I've ever punished with it for not locking their workstation.

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

Re: One software manager to rule them all!

I've actually discovered that the "Xbox Game Bar", despite me not asking for it to be here, has a not-too-shabby screen recorder built into it that can record only the active window and other such useful stuff. Sometimes, just sometimes, a thing that you want is already in Windows (especially since 10, when they caught onto such "modern" "wonders" as multiple desktops, and various other stuff we'd all been using third-party tools to accomplish).

Now if only the Snip & Sketch tool didn't utterly torpedo the window manager for my session necessitating a reboot whenever I used it to take a sectional screenshot.

Re: One software manager to rule them all!

Hey, thanks for pointing that out! I hadn't even spotted the omega.

Hopefully they'll improve it at some point, because…

A little picture of a hotdog took me: Win+. / hotd / Enter / Esc; whereas

≥ took me: Win+. / Shift+Tab / Left Arrow / Enter / Shift+Tab / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Enter / Shift+Tab / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Down Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Right Arrow / Enter / Esc; which is precisely thirty-seven more keydown events than I think are necessary.

Having to hit the Escape key aside (the search function can't be reset without doing this), it'd be nice to be able to type >= and have it find it. For now, Googling's probably quicker for most of that stuff. I'll try to remember to use it though and get some symbols into the history section for future use.

Re: One software manager to rule them all!

I was reminded as I typed that that I can type a ≥ symbol on my phone with three presses, whereas in Windows out-of-the-box I need to either Google "greater than equal" and copy and paste, or surrender myself to charmap, because it's not something I type often enough to warrant learning the Alt code for.

Yet I can bring up an emoji selector with Win + . — I think I'd rather have a decent character input component than a software updater given that it's now 2020.

Re: One software manager to rule them all!

I've given Chocolatey a go every year or so for the past few years, and have usually found that there's enough missing from it for it to not be worth the time, and that what is on it can be infuriatingly out of date (think trying to use Debian's without backports when you're used to being nearer the bleeding edge). I love that it exists and I want it to work, but I also don't want to have to remember which software's being actively maintained on it and which I have to do manually — it's somewhat easier (for me) to just do it all manually.

I kind of assumed Microsoft would have done this, or acquired Chocolatey, a couple of years after it appeared, because I figured an "official" channel for such a thing would make it more appealing to some software makers.

I'm certainly up for giving it a go, but as the article says — neither of them are really package managers. Package managers manage dependencies and security updates and can go all the way to the kernel; whereas Windows software installations tend to be isolated beasts that will more often than not tell you there's an update next time you open them (or scream at you from the systray, if they're Java or Adobe and you've let them).

It'll be interesting to see whether this new thing manifests itself in appwiz.cpl, GPO, the unusable new settings interface, the Windows Store, a new unbidden component or some unholy union of ≥2 of the above.

Windows Terminal hits the big 1.0: Fit for production?

The good thing about SSMS is everybody calls it SSMS, so it's easy to just Win+R, ssms, Enter.

Re: A terminal program?

I just discovered it the other day after reading my hair out over line drawing characters in PuTTY, of all the things to get annoyed about. I believe it also supports code ligatures, which are one of my new favourite silly things.

Re: A terminal program?

:D I was being droll, of course; much as I hate Powershell it's great for sysadmin, when they've written cmdlets for the task at hand. If it's something that requires horrible WMIC commands and string parsing, I have been known to do it with Python in order to preserve my sanity.

I think they were talking about the Start menu dynamic search box rather than the "Run…" box, but have an upvote because I'm still typing pbrush after all these years (I've mercifully not had to open Word directly for about a decade).

You're just annoyed because you missed out on the trophy you get when you find all 50 Charms.

Re: A terminal program?

Fair point, I can drop into Bash or Python from either of them.

[disambiguation needed]

I'm just going to leave how my Start menu program search behaves as I type in the word terminal here:

t: Snipping Tool

te: Microsoft Teams

ter: Windows Terminal

term: Windows Terminal

termi: Windows Terminal

termin: Windows Terminal

termina: Windows Terminal

terminal: Command Prompt

Document? Library? A new kind of component? Microsoft had a hard time explaining what its Fluid Framework is

Re: Will this shite never stop?

We need it for "collaboration", like everything else in the past few years.

Y'know, because collaboration isn't best achieved by actually communicating with others and having rational business processes; what we actually needed was more JavaScript.

SAP proves, yet again, that Excel is utterly unkillable

Re: In my experience

If you're using Excel there's a good chance you do have the budget, but you think that you don't.

Re: Excel excels

I don't believe I can do links yet, but this is a thing I've been throwing at people since it hit the news:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/one-five-genetics-papers-contains-errors-thanks-microsoft-excel

Re: The Wheel of History

The only thing I really remember about Lotus Notes was hitting F5 to refresh my inbox, because that's the standard refresh shortcut and no software would map it to something insane like the delete function…wait, where did that email go?

A favourite thing of mine to say regarding using the right tool for the job is "you can build Tetris in Excel, but if you want to play Tetris you'll pick up a Game Boy".

Re: Excel excels

A single source of many, many truths.

UK's Ministry of Defence: We'll harvest and anonymise private COVID-19 apps' tracing data by handing it to 'behavioural science' arm

Re: Quelle Surprise!

The default's To: in mine.

Third time lucky for Windows 10 2004? Microsoft yet again fiddles with code and adds a go-live SDK licence

Re: Precedent

Months starting at 0? Now you're just being silly. What sort of language would do something that asinine?

It's meant to be the update containing WSL2, so I've been sort-of awaiting it. I'll be running something regularly to make sure updates are disabled for about a month after it drops, mind; given the circus of failures last year that should be sufficient time for them to pull it if (when?) they find out they've created another situation that could not possibly have been foreseen after ditching all the testers.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Re: Beware enterprising users...

Beware enterpis*

Did said mate have the temptation to start referring to himself as "Mr Lizard"?

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

Re: Bob

Bing a Bob for a Big BSOD Bork.