Posts by A.A.Hamilton 104 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
"Amazon ... shared news of the upcoming layoffs in a letter to employees Monday," I've read it a few times: it still doesn't make sense. Is there an apostrophe missing from the word 'employees' ? Not that that would improve understanding: I have no idea what an employee's Monday is. Should I understand it to mean 'employees named Monday'? But no, there can't be 9,000 of them, surely? Or could it mean that El Reg needs to wake up to itself and abandon this irritating headlong rush to the bottom in its American abuse of the English language?
Thanks for this analysis. In the last few months, on my 2008 vintage Thinkpad, I have moved from (previously long-term) Mint XFCE to Zorin OS lite to Linux Lite and now, on the basis of your article, I have just installed MX Linux 21. My impression, after an hour or so of playing, is that this distro meets my needs better than all the previous installations. I am most assuredly not a Linux technical expert, but MX linux installed in a most straight forward way on my dual boot Thinkpad with no glitches apparent so far. Yours was, for me, an excellent recommendation.
I have to strongly endorse this view: for historical reasons, I have been trying to have an in-depth conversation with my GP for more than a year - but I have found it impossible to contact her. The GP practice phone number has a recorded message which directs me to use an on-line system. That system does not allow me to send a message to my GP. I have taken to hand-delivering letters to a letter box in the wall of my GP practice building - I cannot get in the building because the door is never unlocked. 3 letters so far have produced no result. I think that my next step is to take legal advice. What a sorry, ineffectual state the NHS is now in.
Having recently made the journey from Lightroom to darktable, and having found nothing that would cause me to revert, I am not at all clear what I have lost in the way of DAM capability by making this switch. I have made not one single change to the organisation and naming of my image assets. With the 3.6 version of darktable I no longer need to use Photomechanic (Windows) or Rapid Photo Downloader (Linux). My impression is that almost everybody could and should make the switch from Lightroom to darktable.
Yes, it IS a great achievement, notwithstanding the possibly inappropriate comparisons with others nations. What I don't understand, or like, at all, is the deliberate use of the wholly unnecessary snide verb verb 'trumpeting' in the original article. The men and women whose efforts lead to this achievement are just as 'good' as any from the west and are deserving of accolades irrespective of what we have been taught to think about their government and its officers.
Not to forget the technique known as the 'floor sort':
During the (Queensland) summer of of 1963/64 I wrote a programme in FORTRAN for the optimal design of liquid/liquid heat exchangers, At that time the availability of mechanical punches was about zero so I had to hand punch the cards. There were 3 trays, each about 80 to 100 cms long, so I was not going to advance that wretched hand punch all the way to column 73 to add the sequence numbers. On my first entry to the newly built computer room I discovered that a freshly washed floor is very slippery and that a floor sort completes very quickly. I commend the lesson to those with long enough memories.
"...good example of the restrictions on thought and understanding that a linguistic or cultural paradigm can create."
This statement should be engraved in the minds of every person (especially male ones) with aspirations to be some sort of leader, in business, politics or military activity, before those aspirations get out of control.
Thanks for this very stark warning. As an 'adviser' to foreign students studying at UK Universities, I have become used to receiving significant volumes of MS Word documents, like theses, containing multiple media types. Is there a practical alternative? If not, what effective precautions can be taken?
Forgive me, I'm laowai so I speak English only. I know, but don't much care, what a Blockchain is. But what in Ada's name is a 'Dude'? It looks like a typo: should it not be 'Dud' ? If not, how is it pronounced? 'Dudee' ? It's used here in The Register, so it must be an IT term of some sort - with an obscure origin, like 'byte', perhaps. Somebody explain why I should understand and use this word in my work.
Without hesitation I would add Iain M Banks to the list of those who have passed but find hope for the future in the writings of Liu Cixin. His trilogy (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest and Death's End) are philosophically challenging, educational, moving and quite topical.
Ah that's all fixed then, isn't it? You did validate the assumption that the large number of users* who are well past the age of geek-ness fully understand " run "ipconfig /release" and "ipconfig /renew" to get back online" - didn't you?
* btw you do FULLY appreciate the difference between a user and a subject matter expert, yes?
I found the article interesting and entertaining but the question of IP protection and security nagged at me constantly as I read it.
Bearing in mind that cyber crime is now one of the really profitable on-line enterprises of today (thank you Microsoft), surely there must be continuous attempts by states, groups and individuals to access ARM's IP through unlicensed means? And we have seen enough notable successes by such criminals in recent years to make me think that no means of protection via security is fool proof. So what can ARM do? Is operating their R&D processes completely off-line (physically and logically) either sensible or possible?
However an even bigger risk is to ARM's IP after it has been transferred to a partner. Those partners are, on average, going to be slightly less motivated than ARM itself to protect that IP. Worse, as the number of parters increases so does the risk of one of them shooting themselves in the foot accidentally or, depending on personal cupidity, on purpose.
The ownership of the IP cannot be protected through legal processes. The most likely source for cyber criminals for this sort of prize is going to be Russia or China, where IP protection is in practice impossible depending on how well connected the relevant government official is and how much he might be able to enrich his life.
What's ARM's strategy here?
I protest; vigorously: Queensland is NOT in the middle of nowhere; it's well to the right of it, both geographically and politically. And I'll also endorse the Health System there: good care in Princess Alexandra hospital 55 years ago means I'm still well, physically......
Although I buy into one of the central messages of this article (apps. are as much a source of vulnerability as the underlying OS), the numbers are misleading: they refer only to known issues. What the total number is (i.e. including the actual, but as yet unknown, issues) is anybody's guess. And anybody does have a habit of guessing, doesn't he?
Typing the first of these search arguments into my version of LInux Chrome, with Google as default engine, produces a majority of hits as quotes from the the Bible: Jonah, Proverbs, John, Judges, 1st Peter, James, Matthew, Moses, 1st John and so on. Not a naughty bit among them.
I don't have any great concern about the technology MS is using or how they deploy it - for this application. What immediately turns me off this article is the use of the word 'Bing'.
Come on you chaps out there with the highly developed sense of, well, something: what possible justification can there be for the use of this utterly inane word here in quasi-literate UK? What possible connection does it have to IT? In fact. to anything?
It looks like crap; it reads like crap; it feels like crap; it must be crap - yes?
I don't know enough about the need for Java and hence the risk implied by this article. Is 'Java' the same as 'Java script'? What is 'java in the browser' and how do I eliminate it if I need, at the same time, to retain 'java' on Windows (various generations) and LInux to run some applications?
Basic guidance would be appreciated.
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