Posts by Zippy's Sausage Factory 766 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2008
Any strategy whose only chance at success relies on flawless execution and perfect timing is doomed from the start.
One side of the equation is Microsoft, remember - a company with the attention span of an excited toddler, who loves hanging onto their old, broken toys, hates change and enjoys bullying the other kids at playgroup until their toys are broken and nobody wants to play with them any more.
So yeah, can't see this being anything other than a 100% success*.
* this may be a lie.
Microsoft's strategy these days seems to be to just bun stuff down while building new stuff somewhere else.
So while hardcore Wunderlist users mosey on somewhere else (Todoist, maybe), MS have probably lost a good set of paying customers there.
And as for Outlook's tasks being useful, that would require joined-up cross-department thinking. Microsoft's never been good at that. Internecine civil war, on the other hand, THAT is something it knows how to do...
If you read MSDN blogs then this sort of attitude seems endemic to Microsoft: if it doesn't cause Microsoft employees a problem, then any reason they can find not to deal with the problem will do.
"It's not a problem because you can only cause it if something else happens first"
"It's not a problem because that's how it's designed, even though it violates the specification, because it needs to be compatible with Excel 3.0 or whatever"
"It's not a problem because it's already on our fix list".
Microsoft: the customer is never right.
It's just a matter of time before enterprises start wising up and moving to Libre or Open Office, and the only real showstopper is Outlook/Exchange which doesn't (yet) have a feelalike open source alternative.
As for me, despite having Office 365 I recently installed LibreOffice so I could get some work done - Excel 2016 is horrifically bug ridden, keeps freezing, crashing or just stops updating the screen.
It has HP written on it. In my experience, that's not something that screams "this is reliable technology".
Says he who once opened a fairly new printer to load some paper in it and almost got hit in the eye by a flying spring.
I won't mention how many friends have missing keys on their HPs, or the number of HP printers I personally have binned over the years. But let's say that it's somewhere in the region of 100%, whereas other models is still lagging at 0%, despite some of these devices being older (and less gently treated).
I always thought that one of the key goals of agile is to be able to cope with clients who continually try to change the specs and architecture. Although to be fair, hiding under the desk with some painkillers and a bottle of gin are also a possible (if shorter term) solution...
The "strategy boutiques" saw "agile" becoming popular and they now use it as a buzzword.
These days, I put it in my "considered harmful" bucket, along with GOTO, teaching people to program using BASIC, and "upgrading" to Office 2016*.
* Excel, in particular.
I notice no mention of something along the lines of "we're going to start building stuff people actually want to buy again, rather than just getting foisted upon them by corporate suits whose bonus depends entirely on their ability to cut a deal to save 50 cents per seat for the whole company"
Is it me, or am I starting to get cynical these days?
@Androgynous Cupboard
You're assuming that the generated "plaintext" private key is always held securely, and I'm not sure that's the case. The insertion of malware onto the generator platform would be the obvious attack surface, and once this was done the automatic "slurping" of all private keys becomes a trivial matter. (Got any "kompromat" on any WhatsApp employees? Just send them a USB stick...)
Naturally, while domestic law enforcement might play by the rules, I very much doubt foreign intelligence agencies, hacker collectives or criminal enterprises would have much incentive to do the same.
Which is why I've had bosses ask why I don't want an upgrade to my development machine.
"But this is one of the oldest machines in the company? Why?"
"Because if it doesn't work well on here, it's not fast enough. And I don't like writing slow code..."
I am wondering if Munroe got the inspiration from the first "Real Programmers" rant: Real Programmers don't use Pascal
Or The Story of Mel?
Eschew obfuscation
Sounds like the name of a modern death metal track. Seriously, seems bands have a competition among themselves to see how many polysyllabic words they can use per album that haven't been cited since the 1600s.
I blame Slayer*
Joke alert because ... er... this isn't a very serious post?
* last time I looked up abascinate, "Reign In Blood" is cited from 1986 as the first usage for about 300 years, the show offs...
Then you'll remind them of the revenue cost after it has all died down and they'll be happy again. I for one am grateful that I don't have to mess about supporting exchange server, as I think many people are.
Doesn't work when it means you've just lost a £100K (or more) deal. In that case it's usually "who suggested we start using this rubbish - I want them fired and a proper system installed to replace this malarkey, AND I WANT IT TODAY"
(Paris Hilton because that's as good an analogy for an IT manager as I can think of...)
MSFT has been pushing "don't use user agent sniffing" in their web development guidelines for years. Shows that their own devs don't actually bother reading their own guidelines.
Actually, Office 2016 has so many bug reversions, I'm wondering whether they didn't just try and cut costs by giving all the dev work on it to interns, but maybe I'm just being cynical...
That used to really annoy me too, a few years ago. Unlimited 3G, yet metered Wifi. And everything insisted that "I need wifi to upload this huge file that will cost you extra money on wifi, but won't cost you a cent on 3G..."
That kept me on Android longer than I really wanted to because Apple devices don't know the difference between an Android wifi share and real wifi (but they do with Apple, and treat it as mobile data - which is really annoying).
The new metered connection stuff on Android, allowing limits - it's a step in the right direction. But it's not a cure... (not until people wake up to the fact that in some circumstances, mobile really is cheaper than wifi...)
I use SQL every day at work. I don't really care whether the server is running Windows or Linux, just whether I can connect and run the queries I need and tune them.
To the extent that Windows is essentially finished, especially for RDBMS servers, this is the beginning of the end. That SQL is one of the "big dogs" of the database world, and that it exclusively ran on Windows was a big USP for Windows Server. It isn't any more.
You don't need Windows domain servers - AD in the cloud will do. You don't need Windows Server to run a DHCP server, a DNS server, a mail server (Office 365, remember), and now you don't need it for on-premises SQL (you didn't really need it for cloud anyway, did you?)
With the advent of Visual Studio Code for Linux, you quite possibly don't need the development stack I use every day, either.
You can only swim against the tide so long. The day of Microsoft dominance is ending. They are slowly, but surely, going back to being just one among the many, and the demise of Windows Server is simply another nail in that coffin. I suspect Windows desktop to be around a bit longer, but macOS, Chrome OS and desktop Android machines need to start selling in bigger numbers before that finally falls off the perch.
If the "submit anonymously" is a single checkbox, and it's ticked by default, then yes, it could be a simple administrative error. In which case Mr Dine could well be handed a P45 for incompetence.
On the other hand, it may be a deliberate attempt to deceive. In which case Mr Dine will probably get handed a P45 for being careless enough to get caught.
I think this may be what used to be known at Sun Microsystems as a "career-limiting move"
"And while we're on the subject, they're not ex-pats they're immigrants!"
The OED says an ex pat is "a person living permanently abroad", whereas immigrate is "to come into a foreign country to live there permanently". So Gary "Fingers" Bankjob* living on the Costa del Sol is an immigrant into Spain, an expat from the UK, and somewhere on Scotland Yard's "most wanted" list.
* The names have been changed to protect the guilty. I ain't no grass.
Yet there are those who come from outside of the UK, Europe, Africa, wherever, and they have a better comprehension of the English language than most natives do.
And I doubt any of these will have problems passing this test. Unlike me if I needed to become an Uber driver here and had to take a Portuguese test. Which, I have to add, would be perfectly right and proper, as far as I'm concerned. (The fact that I don't have a driving licence might prove a bigger stumbling block, but that's beside the point...)
I know what you mean. Despite having been run over - twice - my 3a is still working (even if the hinge has now broken irreperably). I'm considering whether I want to take the risk of having something that will sit unused in a drawer forever. But then if this fills the gaps I just might be able to get away with an iPhone SE if I do that, which would mean I get my headphone socket back.
But ah, I have so many fond memories of the Psion as a full time device :)
What's to stop the banks starting charging a bigger fee? "Ah well, the fee was 0.5% but due to the economy, it's now 5%, sorry about that. Want a choice in the matter? Oh sorry, there isn't one now. This is now the cheapest way to pay. You pay 5% as the buyer, the seller pays another 5%, we always win. Maybe you should have kept on using cash, but you didn't - you gave us this power, can't blame us for using it. Have a nice life."
Is it me or are MS doing everything in their power to make Windows die? Seriously, they seem to be trying to annoy developers as much as possible, competing directly with their business partners, making Windows 10 annoy its own users...
I mean I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but I heard a bunch of pigeons the other day whispering "coup, coup"*....
* Old Bill Hicks joke, not one of mine. Sadly.
I always had a hankering for someone to licence SPARC and produce a low-cost version, then stuff a Linux (or even Open Solaris) based SPARC PC out the door (probably using as many off the shelf components as possible). No chances of MS snarling about the Windows tax, because it can't run it. I'd have probably bought one, five or ten years ago.
You know, "this is the last version of Solaris, everything else will be an update to the existing version..."
People really seem to have forgotten what version numbers are actually FOR these days - they're to communicate that something significant has changed and this new version might break stuff...
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