Posts by that one in the corner 5065 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
If you can identify those steps (and doing so is another level of difficulty) don't write "Important, do not skip" in red above them.
Instead, give those steps their own boxes to be signed off and dated by the operator following the instructions. If that fails to concentrate their minds at least you have a paper trail on them.
Bonus points if those steps also write something to a log.
Like telling people not to pick up random USB memory sticks, not to click on random links and not to let things auto-run?
These are hardly new threat vectors and, aside from the last, not a lot MS can do about them!
(Yes, saw the bit about other ways to get infected, but without any more info on how, there is nothing to say about those)
The pandemic was an attempt by TV manufacturers to get everyone hooked on molecular biology and use their 3D telly to understand the ins and outs of protein spikes and receptors.
Zuckerberg promotes Metaverse so that we can really get to grips with mRNA.
What? It's no more outlandish than the other conspiracies and at least this one could have made a profit!
> Do you have any citation for your outlandish claim...
FYI requesting a citation is in no way, shape or form "making a claim".
Even if you see a claim being made that you agree with but have not seen any genuine proof for, you must always seek citations, otherwise you are just sitting in an echo chamber of wishful thinking and fantasy.
> The burden of proof is obviously the other way around.
The best tactic of a flerf. Not a good debating model to follow.
> they're more 'one and done' immune system training aids
What are these magic 'one and done' things?
Or did you not finish your full course of Polio vaccinations? Hepatitis A and B? MMR?
Are you up to date with your Tetanus booster?
Boosters for Meningitis, Shingles and others are indicated if you are in an at risk group.
Maybe you need to check with your doctor...
> The water is fine outside of social media
If only some people didn't try so hard to muddy the water.
The wife got fed up trying to find information about a local film festival that starts - today. They do have a website, which tells us that the details (like, the venue!) will be released soon, but it does give an email. The reply basically said: they didn't see the need to put anything on the website because all the details were being "released on social media". The End.
No idea which social media, which page or which hashtag or ... just "on social media". Did find some tweets that we (now) know to be relevant, but those basically said "yay, Fred's short film will be in the festival now". When? Where?
Wish this was a rare occurrence, but nope.
Bleeping social media mindset.
> the temperature record of the Earth in the pre-human period has fluctuated wildly
Nice wording, "wildly", let's try to make it seem like those changes happened at anything like the rate we've been measuring the current rise to occur at.
> I dispute the casual assertion that with no human involvement the trend would be downwards.
Despite the fact that we've seen measurable effects in places where human activity has been (temporarily) reduced over the last few years?
> there is a healthy market for toilets you don't have to flush thrice to sink a turd here stateside
When the low-water-usage loos came over to the UK and sofa dollies got their knickers in a twist about it, engineers pointed out that it isn't the volume, it's the rate it swirls around the bowl that's important. If you're having to flush thrice, you'll be feeling the need, the need for speed (and maybe look at the diet, eh?).
As the old adage goes, it ain't what you got, it's how you use it that's important.
> could also try thermal recovery off of it, but that's getting crazy.
Now you're just trying to encourage someone to try!
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/federal-regulations-toilet-gallons-88640.html
> The Energy Policy Act of 1992, which became law in 1994, mandates a maximum flush volume of 1.6 gallons for toilets manufactured and installed after this date
(the US regs don't seem to be as amenable to searching and quoting as the UK ones, so haven't quoted the specific text)
50A down multiple parallel pins?
Make sure you're wearing a hair net (and beard net!) before plugging this lot together. Muck on the connectors (hairs, dandruff) is going to get carbonised (aka burnt) and/or just create a hight-resistance path. The results - well, guess.
Oops, yes, I was being sarcastic :-)
Thoroughly agree about LaTeX - especially as, given all comments about trying to use HTML so-called "manuals", I can turn my head to the right an see, oooh, two feet of dead-tree books, all beautifully typeset, from Don's Blue Lion, Leslie's more staid lion, to the TUG 25th anniversary collection! Well-thumbed: have got to straighten out the spiral binding again. </fanboy>
I've had some very nice results from getting the raw text written in Markdown (or into a Wiki that can be stripped into Markdown), so that authors are not distracted from the meaning by loads of formatting (and when they try to get clever it is easy to strip out! Mwaahaha). Then collate those into a semblance of order, shove it all into Pandoc to be converted into LaTeX (pulling in a template with all the proper formatting) and finally into XeLaTeX to generate the final PDF.
The lesson from all of the above: scripts are your friend! Oh, and Markdown is Good Enough for collecting text *and* plays well with Version Control.
Digital signatures won't stop Google reading your email - signing is different to encrypting the email text. Don't know what governments did to stop use of signatures.
We don't have commonly used digital signatures because Microsoft won't support them in an easy to use fashion: the more I saw email coming from Outlook the fewer digital signatures appeared; the more email was sent to Outlook the more the complaints and confusion about "this gibberish" (compounded by top-posting, aargh). Microsoft didn't/couldn't own The Web Of Trust so you don't get to use it.
It has always boggled me that lawyers, in particular, never bothered to learn the basics of what email is and never bothered to demand digital signatures - I guess they just managed to figure out to make more money from the status quo.
Indeed. PDF has its flaws[1] but we do seem to be sadly short on good suggestions on what to use instead. No, not HTML but something that does what PDF used to promise[2]: immutable content and immutable format, but still human and machine readable.
[1] and tonight's award for po-faced understatement goes to...
[2] what a vast number at least believed it was promising them; they never spotted the fingers, crossed behind PDF's back
> people trying to google YouTube videos for IT and programming stuff
And the fact that people make videos like that, post them and don't even write the important stuff down in the description!
Just last week I found out that a Windows Registry edit could fix a driver problem. I knew this because multiple forum and even Reddit posts said this fix existed. Every single such post just pointed back to one YT video, which showed the author running regedit and reading out what was happening. Against a YT compressed, blurry, screenshare. Even the guy's blog post on the subject just linked to the video. Not one time did any of these textual posts write out the Registry paths involved. Nope, read the blurry screenshare and hope you caught the guy's accent correctly.
/rant
(Now I guess I ought to write that Registry fix up properly, start a publicly visible blog and post it. OTOH, it was for a MIDI driver: I suffered for my music, should let everyone else suffer for theirs!).
If only there was another way to generate PDFs than just relying solely on Adobe's offerings.
Although, yes, having "features" like embedded scripts is highly questionable (and they aren't even scripted in PostScript!), scripts in Word docs can do Bad Things just as easily.
How about we just stick to PDF v1.2 - we'll lose one or two actually nice things but it'll be worth it.
Strangely, I've never had Acrobat installed (above my pay grade) and yet I could have sworn that I was generating PDFs at a rate of knots. Using Open Source tools to boot. Only had Adobe reader to sample test my files against.
But your comment has convinced me that that must have all been just a dream.
Those tools do indeed exist - but by the time a company has reached that state of enlightenment they have a team of fully trained writers who could do a decent job armed only with Windows Notepad and a good attitude.
Meanwhile, the rest are still getting their web team to handle the 300 page online help with tooling bought in for the four-colour drool-proof puff pieces that made up the company website (it's on the web, it's all the same). Upstairs, Sales are dumping pages out of Confluence (that the devs put there only after being actioned in the Scrum), desperately figuring out why, if that page has a later timestamp it seems to show an earlier design (hint: a manager did a search and replace to match "Corporate Standards"). At least getting this lot to hand their results over as PDF means you can show them that it is an incoherent mess without a logical reading order, do it better, without being told "it is a living hyperdocument, you just haven't learnt how to follow the link graph".
I was taught to touch-type, on a massive old machine (shame so many of my comments into web pages are done using a tablet, where I'm down to one-finger typing!) yet I still think that auto-complete can be very handy.
Just so long as it isn't trying to do too much, in which case it just becomes utterly infuriating. The worst thing that it can do is *insert* the current-choice-of-completed-word, by which I mean it moves the cursor to *after* its choice, as it then that you can unwittingly choose the wrong thing. Another truly painful action is to scroll the window, moving the line of text "because that way there is space for the list of options to be drawn".
When the auto-complete just shows a list of words that start with the prefix you've typed so far, allowing you to quickly select one OR simply carry on typing your word without hindrance (btw, dropping from the list those that now don't match the longer prefix) that can be really, really useful. Even if you do know all the possibilities. ESPECIALLY if it stops people complaining that the variable/function names are too long, too much to type in! Decent auto-complete also allows things like using the cursor keys to lengthen (and shorten) the current prefix, scroll the list of matches etc. Even allowing simple matching, without resorting to a full-fat search: I know the function name has something to do with "Flibble" but was it "DoFilbble" or "CommenceFlibble" or... so type [magic-character]Flibble and the autocomplete list is populated.
I should perhaps own up to the fact that I have been responsible, in the pre-GUI days, of adding auto-complete into the TUI of a few commercially released applications, where it appeared to be appreciated by our Users. At least, no-one phoned to complain about *that* part of the programs...
>> what I type is what I want
> you typed X but we think you meant to type Y
Aren't we confusing autoCOMPLETION with autoCORRECT here?
Agree, autocorrect is a pain in the backside, but I didn't spot anywhere in the Cat9 demo that showed that being done.
And having had a look-see at the demo video and reading the "Whipping up a new Shell" blog, I can confidently say that a younger me would have been all over this, but these days it is going to take a few goes around to get to grips with what I just saw!
Arcan on its own reads like something worth learning more about and I'm not going to completely pooh-pooh Cat9 without having actually tried it (may quietly ignore it because there are so many other things to be getting on with, but not deride it on that basis). However, the article points out that it is complex to build to get the whole stack running and I can see that being the time sink that prevents "just giving it a quick run around the block" :-(
Thank for the article, Liam, and keep on digging up interesting stuff like this.
So if you use Shutterstock to generate an image of "pretty girl sitting on meringue" are they going to try and land-grab that: "Now *any* image of a pretty girl sitting on a meringue generated by DALL-E is going to have 'Shutterstock' watermarks slapped all over it (unless you pay)"?
No, no ROM is correct.
When you pay, they create the lithography masks to fab your own personalised ROM, which is big enough to hold the Forbes 500 Company 'phone directories - and a complete copy of the blockchain(s) that contain the NFT that is the only proof-of-ownership you get for the this 'phone.
