Posts by tfewster 1373 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
"OEM staffing shortages have become a huge issue," Proctor told us. "OEMs have not been hitting the timeline stipulated in their contracts."
=> Breach of contract penalties? Mind you, the OEMs will just change the contracts to looser SLAs and limited penalties. The users are still over a barrel.
> No: you need different levels of documentation, even experienced users need documentation - but about things that would mystify a novice user.
And user guides as well as administrator guides.
The idea that introductory documentation should concentrate on leading the new user [of any type] through the basic and common operations, seems to rarely occur to the documentor.
Links/footnotes to the appropriate reference pages can be included, without overwhelming the user with a common use case who just wants a "quick start" guide.
It's not worthy of an On Call of its own: But around 2004 an exec forwarded a hoax email "from the London Ambulance Service" to the entire company:
"New gang members drive around, deliberately with no lights on their cars. The first person who 'flashes' them has to be followed by that new gang member in their car, who then has to fire a shot into that vehicle"
The "London Ambulance Service" as a source raised my suspicions, so I checked snopes.com: www.snopes.com/fact-check/lights-out/
I politely emailed the exec with the link. They had the grace to send a retraction to everyone.
> ...so no hunting down individual ini files...
Yes, creating {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} is far more intuitive than "cd $APPDIR;ls -l *.ini" (-‸ლ)
Thanks to @Avram Piltch for listing these tweaks; Not all of which I want/need, and PowerShell scriptlets to back up the Registry and automate the tweaks would be handy, but I'm not complaining, I wasn't even aware of the 400ms delay being artificial.
Edit: Yes, of course it should be /etc/$APP/*.ini, my bad for assuming app devs followed Unix/Linux conventions
To be fair to Wilma - We've all done it (or will do it). Showing the current directory in the command prompt is a standard out-of-the-box setting these days to reduce the risk, but back in the day it wasn't.
It's rite of passage that teaches situational awareness and paranoia. And the importance of backups!
> Used to have similar finger pointing with our network team...
Me too. Our servers had multiple NICs for different traffic types (users, inter-server comms, backups). A regular issue was various switch ports getting "hung". The quick troubleshooting fix was to get the network team to reset the switch port. I say "quick" - the conversations invariably went:
Networks: Please reboot the server to check the problem isn't at your end.
Me: That will take at least 20 minutes and cause wider disruption; We've seen this issue multiple times, and the quick troubleshooting fix is for you to remote in and reset the switch port. I can tell you exactly which switch & port it is. It will take you 2 minutes. Or I can escalate to $TECHDIRECTOR.
Networks: <grumble , grumble> We've checked the port and there are no errors.
Me: Thank you. Did you reset it? Because the errors went away during our conversation.
Networks: No, no, we just checked it. The network is never the problem...
Me: [knowing they had reset the port] Cool, thanks. As you can't find any errors that indicate the server/NIC, we'll keep "reset the switch port" at the top of our troubleshooting checklist.
On one memorable occasion a switch for backups traffic hung completely so all servers using that switch were impacted - Guess what, Networks suggested rebooting all the servers (-‸ლ)
Like any public space, anyone can come in. If they misbehave, they'll be asked to leave. If they persist, police and judges can get involved. Banning from all public spaces can be ordered by a court.
Visiting a public website should be treated in the same way
- I'm curious if "All cloud" includes private clouds, from VMs/VM hosts upwards.
- The scalability of distributed computing (if your app is designed for it) is one advantage of clouds; Another is avoiding the long timescales and capital needed to build and fill your own data centres. Is that short-term thinking or truly a better way? Monolithic efficiency vs distributed flexibility? I'm trying to be open minded, but still don't get the rush to cloud. Are there any unbiased analyses out there?
Edit: https://www.gigabyte.com/Article/what-is-private-cloud-and-is-it-right-for-you?lan=en seems balanced, even for a hosting provider.
- Like Mark Twain, I suspect the report of traditional mainframes death are greatly exaggerated; There are still use cases for mainframes instead of supercomputing clusters. And although mainframe skills are rarer, mainframes are more efficient in some ways.
I take your point, but your comment is a bit disingenuous - Up until relatively recently, boosters have been throwaway components rather than carrying extra fuel or parachutes to enable recovery.
So the fair comparison is "how many rockets exploded before they had finished their task?".
Now recovery is a goal too. I assume SpaceX has the real numbers for recoverable vs throwaway costs and has decided that recoverables will be cheaper in the long run.
Their previous statement, "no evidence that customer or employee data has been improperly accessed." just meant "we haven't looked".
"Extensive investigation" just means "we've looked now".
I await the "Thorough" or "Complete" reports.
> Who demanded that AI and tabs be built into Notepad, a program that people loved for its simplicity?
Actually, I like the tabs and restore on restart functions that grown up editors such as Notepad++ already have. But AI? No. Just No.
> 7. Pin apps to specific screens & 8. Program groups launch multiple, related apps at once.
Please, yes - to quickly get back to where I was after frequent crashes/unwanted reboots.
I use "launchnmove": https://robsnotebook.com/batch-to-launch-an-application-at-desired-window-position-from-command-line/
> 5. Bring back the movable, resizeable taskbar
This falls into the category of "Why did you remove something that worked?". Also restore:
Cascade/tile app windows e.g. open emails or spreadsheets that I frequently refer to.
Borders on File Explorer windows. The OS is called "Windows", not "Window"!
Blacklist/whitelist are better replaced with the even more descriptive blocklist/allowlist. They can also be abbreviated to block/allow, and the abbreviations used as verbs.
OTOH, I have nothing against blacklist/whitelist. They don't have a derogatory origin, any more than "blackballed" does, and anyone retconning them into being offensive should be hanged.
https://www.markreds.it/2018/07/02/linux-is-sexy/
$ unzip; strip; touch; finger; grep; mount; fsck; more; yes; fsck; fsck; fsck; unmount; sleep
https://www.appservgrid.com/paw92/index.php/2019/04/01/20-funny-commands-of-linux-or-linux-is-fun-in-terminal/
20. Linux Tweaks
$ who | grep -i blonde | date; cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
I applaud your courageous decision to treat business users with the same contempt that you show for home users. I'm sure they will appreciate saving time on negotiations and so won't think about value for money.
I presume that you'll also stop trying to bribe^Wretain customers. "Thinking of moving to FOSS? OK, bye."
> It's a truism that moving to open source doesn't save much money, as proprietary licensing spend is replaced by training, support, and local development costs
Agreed on the "training excuse". As an end-user, I know what I want to do, e.g. make a bit of text bold. The challenge is finding the button in this version of MS Office/LibreOffice/Whatever.
Support is pretty much the same. Plus, https://xkcd.com/627/
Local development costs - Really? There are plenty of open source apps and knowledge out there.
OK, I'm trivialising, but don't forget that most people are happy to learn a new OS & apps when they get a smartphone or replace their home PC/console/game. They have the capacity to learn, they just need some positive incentive.
The phrase "responsibly disclosed" gets interesting here:
- Would it be more "responsible" to disclose Russian satellite bugs to the Russians or to the US spooks?
- Or Starlink bugs to astronomers, who might in turn feel it would be "responsible" to remove them from the skies/orbits to clear space?
> adding a visualization to the task bar to show things like CPU load and network activity
Didn't task manager do that at one time?
But rather than have more clutter on the screen, how about "smart" notifications of unusual behaviour [Yeah, a bit late after you've been infected, unless the app is sandboxed].
You could call it..."AI" :-D
[Shush, don't give the game away!]
Dear advertisers, please keep funding the websites I visit. If* your ads are relevant and not too annoying, I might even click on them to find out more.
[* Could someone let me know if advertisers do clean up their act, so I can disable my adblocker and keep up my side of the bargain? Thanks for your help!]
> ...you'd block your browser apps, which effectively makes Recall useless..
Which also demonstrates how utterly pointless* Recall is - You normally want the current state of a web page, and can use your browser history to find it if you really can't construct a search query. But if you thought that an unscrupulous website owner would change e.g .Ts & Cs, you take a screenshot yourself (or use the wayback machine).
* Disclaimer - I know I'm something of a Luddite. If you have valid use cases that can't be handled in a better way, feel free to enlighten me!
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