Posts by Vincent Ballard

Re: Not bad...

I'm at the opposite extreme. Back when I was a cub scout, we had a trip to the library in the nearest town and the librarians wanted to demonstrate their computer system, so they asked whether any of us had a library card. I did, so they tried to find my account by searching on my first and last name. Then they asked whether I had a middle name. They managed to find me on the fourth page of results of people living in the same county who shared my first, middle and surname. I can hide by being a tree in a very large forest.

Re: "learnt many things about how not to run a company"

You comment about Kim is on point, but Putin didn't self-build. He was a mid-flier in the Leningrad KGB (whose career was helped by the purge following the exfiltration of a defector, Oleg Gordievsky, by the SIS) whose superiors gave him permission to change tracks to politics. He's managed to consolidate power quite effectively, but previous generations set up his empire for him and helped him on his way.

I hadn't noticed that, and you're right that it seems weird, but there are scenarios where it's not as weird as it seems. Maybe she's a mature student doing a second undergrad degree because she's the rare marketer who actually wants to understand the product they're selling. Actually, correct the end of my first sentence to "weird in a different way".

(On the question of undergrad theses in general: at my university it was called a dissertation and it didn't have to be novel research, but the end-of-course project was a substantial paper, on the order of 10000 words.)

Re: Disney villain act.

It probably can't qualify as attempted murder without a specific target victim, but there will be some equivalent to reckless endangerment.

I don't think that's quite right, because the patient won't necessarily know what side effects the real stuff has (and anyway, side effects vary from person to person). But I am reminded of something I read decades ago about making placebos taste really unpleasant because the patient will think that something that nasty must be effective.

Re: "at least one screen on our network that looks like this for a few seconds"

In-bus displays seem to be particularly prone to problems. My latest photo in this collection is a blue screen of "your computer needs recovery" from Schippol taken 10 days ago, although since it was taken with the camera of a cheap phone it's not worth sending in.

Re: So true to life

My biology teacher claimed that the shape of the rubber plant leaves was due to damage from thrown board rubbers.

Re: The scissor graphic...

I don't think they're scissors at all. That's a single blade with no hinge. It's a very impractical dagger with a knuckleduster-style grip.

Re: "This behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue"

I interpreted her intent as "social media is a great industry", and thought that she'd misplaced the "stain".

Re: "We will not be able to delay revocation beyond that date and time."

They're afraid that if they delay more than 24 hours, the browsers will implement official policy and remove their root certificates from the browsers' trusted list, causing all of their certificates (and not merely the 0.4% at issue) to become worthless for interactions involving anything other than wget/curl/equivalent.

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Peter Kay has a routine on mondegreens. My favourite is Duffy's "Begging you for birdseed".

I have an A/S in electronics and a degree in computer science, but I never build my own machines because I'm not confident in my ability to correctly install the CPU's heat-sink. I spec them out (IMO pre-designed ones always skimp on RAM) and get a local shop to build them.

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

"Welding" and "soldering" is the same word in Spanish, and I wouldn't be surprised if English is the only language that distingushes them, due to its tendency to take a Germanic word and its equivalent French word and give them subtly different meanings.

For sacrifices when installing Windows updates on the domain controller?

Re: Input validation

My bank has an automated system to use it for authentication when you phone them, before they connect you to an operator. The bank also switched from numeric-only passwords to alphanumeric ones. But, and it's a big one, although you can enter numbers by dialling, for letters you have to use voice recognition, and the voice recognition fails spectacularly for me. The last time I tried it I made six attempts on the phone and then gave up and went across town to visit "my" branch.

Re: Don't follow the instructions

Sometimes the documentation was written second, but the system has changed underneath it. I've got a document which explains how to do a fairly complex sequence of steps in the Azure Portal, and every time I use it I discover that the Portal's UI has changed.

Re: That headline

Isn't it "I take full responsibility, which is why I've fired the person who was to blame"?

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

I'm not saying that the meme is correct: just trying to save other people who had the same idle curiosity as me a bit of searching.

Re: Curious 6000kva?

Here in Spain there aren't many pubs, but there are plenty of bars and cognac for breakfast is not unheard-of in the heading-for-retirement generation and above.

Re: Compensation?

I think you're misparsing that. It would be "I will tell the truth now if you give me immunity for having not told the truth earlier".

Re: Dye Houses

The warmth? I accidentally filled my parents' bathroom with ladybirds a couple of years ago when visiting them at Christmas. I opened the window slightly before showering, to avoid steaming the room up, unaware that there were dozens of ladybirds enjoying the warmth and possibly humidity escaping through the cracks in the frame.

In Spain it's Xitter, where X in Iberian languages is pronounced like sh in English.

Re: Yearly tasks....

The CAB have pretty much killed off certificates with multi-year validity, but since getting bitten by a certificate expiry I have a weekly task which sends me a report of certificates that are expiring in the next few weeks. Now the only way that certificates cause me support headaches are the users in third world countries who use 10-year-old Android phones whose root certificate lists need updating, and we only get one or two of those a year.

Re: Mmmm.....

El Mundo and La Vanguardia maybe, but El País is at most about as far right as Tony Blair.

Re: Perhaps ...

I'm not sure that it's really necessary for every MP to read every word of every bill. Surely part of the point of having parties is that that kind of detail work can be centralised? But certainly each party should have a team of lawyers and subject matter experts, whether MPs or not, read each bill carefully and create an internal report.

On the other hand, five months from guilty verdict to sentencing seems like an enormous gap.