"We recommend a hardware refresh to Surface Hub 3 [...]"
I recommend a software refresh out of Micros$t's walled garden. It sounds as though the thing has a regular computer in it. Can that run Linux?
396 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Aug 2020
At one job, where my desktop machine ran Windows but I spent most of my day ssh'ed into various Unix boxen, I arranged something along that line using per-host prefs settings in the ssh client (SecureCRT, I think it was). Pale pastel background colours so as not to make my eyes hurt, but with distinctly green/yellow/pink casts as appropriate.
At another job, one of the web developers made a conspicuously messed-up version of their site's main top-of-page banner, and hacked his own desktop's hosts file such that he saw his weird banner on the dev site but the proper one on production. (This being "Who, Me?", one wants a punch line about his messed-up banner getting promoted to prod, but I'm not aware of that ever happening.)
In a more distantly related sort of visual cue, another web dev had, as his desktop's background, a series of rectangles (not concentric but, umm, con-top-left-corneric), sized to match then-common monitor resolutions, to remind himself of the limited visual real estate our users had available, as opposed to his own generous monitor.
"Fortunately, it appears that Trump grasps the route cause of this pointless conflict - the ever eastward expansion of NATO."
What was it that convinced Finland and Sweden to abandon their long-term neutrality? Oh, right -- Russia's invasion of Ukraine. If Putin's goal was to stop "the ever-eastward expansion of NATO", how's that working out for him? In terms of that strategic goal, he's already lost. All that's left for him is to keep sending the youth of his own country and at least one other into a meat grinder in order to -- he hopes -- conquer some territory and thus save face.
What imperialists like Putin and Trump refuse to accept is that the only people who should have a say over who governs any given territory, be it Ukraine, Greenland or Canada, is the people who actually live there. (I'm not letting the USA off the hook here; they have a long history of imperialism, stretching back at least to 1812. Now, under the very stable orange genius, it's rearing its ugly head again.)
[monitor's brightness turned down]
I had an odd thing rather like this just yesterday. On the highway and noticed that I couldn't see the rightmost part of my car's odometer, fuel gauge, etc. (It's a newish-to-me second-generation Prius.) I could see the essential bit -- the speedometer -- but still it was annoying and cause for concern. "What's come loose in that panel assembly, and how much is it going to cost to fix it?"
Then I remembered that the same thing had happened once before. I reached forward and removed the old pay-and-display ticket that was lying flat on the dashboard, not obscuring the display at all. Problem solved.
As nearly as I can figure it without getting off my duff to go look at the car, the actual displays are mounted in the dashboard facing straight up, and a mirror reflects them to where the driver can see them.
"these eliminated jobs has been pushed onto.........THE CUSTOMER."
The buzzword is externalizing costs.
Environmental degradation is another example -- "We'll foul the air/water/landfill and leave it to someone else to clean up our mess."
Indeed.
The "vessel's left" term used to be larboard, but that led to a different sort of confusion, and so a word that didn't sound like starboard was chosen instead. For those interested, here are the etymologies of all three terms, including the specialized sense of port.
A different medical use for marker on skin.
A few years ago my foot was badly swollen and painful with some kind of infection. The doctor prescribed an antibiotic. He then took out a marker and drew an irregular line on my foot -- basically a contour line. His instructions were to expect the swelling to increase a little more over the next day or so (I think; it's been a few years) -- "but if it goes past the line, get to Emergency". (In fact it didn't; all was well in the end.)
Is there any *technical* reason to prefer wired headphones/earbuds over Bluetooth?
I absolutely get people's resentment at being prodded to retire perfectly good kit. I agree! My question isn't about that.
But if one is in the market for a new pair anyway, is there a reason not to go wireless? Having recently done so, I find them incredibly more convenient than my old wired earbuds.
"Whatever fine may be imposed against them, when it comes time to pay after all the ensuing appeals and challenges are over, the corporation being punished will have grown large enough during that time to comfortably file the original fine under its business expenses."
How about this, then:
"The fine is set at X% of the total annual revenue of $CORP or any successor entity. The actual dollar amount to be paid shall be determined in the year in which the final appeal is concluded and the requirement to actually pay the fine is locked in."
Obviously that's just pseudocode; much refinement would be needed for the final wording.
"Platform owners should be forbidden from favoring their own services and competing unfairly with platform tenants."
See also: net neutrality
The above is a well generalized formulation of a principle that needs to be enshrined in law -- and unlike the EU's DMA (as I understand it), the rule needs to apply generally, not just to specifically targeted "gatekeeper" corporations.
In his long-ago youth, my brother totaled our parents' car. For years afterward, he kept that car's now-useless key on his keyring as a reminder to himself of how not to drive.
"[The award is] going to sit pride of place because I want every CrowdStriker who comes to work to see it..."
It seems as though this guy has the same idea. If that Pwnie award gets put in a glass case in CrowdStrike's lobby, it will be serving its purpose.
Time will tell, of course, whether the lesson will be learned...
Medical CT scanners, more likely, given the mention of moving images around. (The acronym used to be "CAT" == "computed axial tomography", but the "axial" has fallen out of use. I presume that's because technological advances mean that images are no longer restricted to the axial plane of the body, but correction/clarification would be welcome).
I suspect you're right about (GTA == Greater Toronto Area), given the reference to "CAD$" (Canadian dollars).
"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model."
- from his "Computer Networks", 1981
(I don't have the original available to check against, so no guarantee that errors haven't crept in.)
In my experience, the go-live often takes place after far too much overtime, not just on the day but in the days/weeks/months leading up to it -- in which case, people can be tired and/or approaching burnout.
Corollary: the willingness to stick around for a while is especially low -- at a moment when the risk of exhaustion-related mistakes makes the need to stick around even higher.
"But "divisible by 4" is entirely adequate for use ... if anything I've written is still in use for something important come 2100, I would be ... very surprised"
Which is exactly the sort of cavalier attitude that caused the Y2K situation in the first place. (Different technical problem of course, but the same short-term thinking.)
I had email in the late 80s via dialup UUCP. My home machine (an AT&T 3B1) had links to two or three friends' machines, and some of those had links to the wider world. They had cron jobs to call each other a few times a day to exchange any accumulated messages.
Email routinely took days to arrive, and it was fun looking through the Received: headers to see the (sometimes circuitous) route it had taken.
Not to mention the fun (TM) with UUCP-style bang paths and the .UUCP pseudo-domain.
When someone gave you their email address, it was wise to send a test message. (From that memory I infer that there was reason to suspect that things might not work, but I no longer recall why, beyond the obvious spelling errors.)
Each TLD makes its own decisions as to how to organize its own namespace. That's kind of the whole philosophy of DNS.
In particular, .co., .ac., and any other peers there might be, are .uk'isms. Try emailing to .co.anything-but-uk and you'll find how un-interchangable that is in general.
"the Y2K bug had no relevance to getting it to boot"
Yes, but was its date right?
I had a desktop system at home whose BIOS wasn't compliant; after the rollover, it would boot up into 1900. There was no problem setting the running system's date to 2000 -- but I had to, on every boot.
A trivial problem in the grand scheme of things, but still, it showed why it was important not to trust even the hardware.
That box's motherboard was of late '94 / early '95 vintage -- by which point they should have known better.