Posts by big_D 6775 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2009
Google likes shouting, but it hates listening.
We were DOSed by a Google IP address, their telephone system just runs you in circles, their abuse@ and postmaster@ email addresses get an automated response saying that the emails are just deleted and not read.
They are like the King and his new clothes. Everybody stares and points, but they don't notice.
In German there is a lovely sentence that sums it up.
"Der Programmierer der Autokorrektur ist ein Erdloch und sollte sich ins Knie fügen!"
which is a polite "autocorrected" way of saying
"Der Programmierer der Autokorrektur ist ein Arschloch und sollte sich ins Knie ficken!"
The English doesn't work so well:
"The programmer of Autocorrect is an hole in the ground and should go acquiesce himself. "
or uncorrected
"The programmer of Autocorrect is an a'hole and should go f*** himself."
No, the huts were simple wood panel structures designed to meet the increased need for workers during the war. They were never designed to be bomb proof and not designed to have been left standing for over 40 years...
To be honest, we were very lucky and our thanks should go to the guys who over-engineered these temporary buildings.
We were doing a software installation at a dockyard. The customer had ordered shielded terminals, for obvious reasons. The hardware supplier decided that shielded was overkill, pocketed the difference and delivered standard terminals...
All went well until somebody on a destroyer decided to test the radar in port, after they had repaired it... Queue a stack of dead terminals lining the wall and the supplier having to fork out for shielded replacements.
I worked for a large UK conglomerate in the late 80s and through the 90s.
Just before I joined, their Addlestone data-centre was in an old bus depot. One night it rained in Biblical proportions and the whole roof caved in. The ops were running round ankle deep in water and knee deep in rubble. The disaster recover procedures were well and truly put to the test that night.
In 1989 the second big hurricane hit the UK and in our little 2nd world war wooden cabins in Titchfield, the walls were flexing in and out and the windows were bowing. We were seriously thinking about going outside and driving home as it would be safer than sitting in this contraption built out of matchsticks!
Just then, I happened to look out the window and looked on in awe as the roof of the new data centre next door lifted up in the air in one piece, lifting up from one end, going vertical, then landing, in one piece, on its back in the car park, making pancakes out of the cars parked there.
We quickly rushed next door to see if anyone was hurt. The glass wall in the stairwell seemed to have been blown out and that caused an updraught that picked up the roof and smacked it down in the carpark. The data centre itself was still intact, but we found the office workers on the top floor still cowering under their desks. Luckily nobody was seriously injured, just very shaken. We took them back to our rickety structure and gave them coffee.
I was then sent back to the debris strewn office to see if I could find any license agreements and other important documents...
In the '87 storm, I was working at Portsmouth Station, on the pier, selling tickets from a porta-cabin perched on the waterfront, selling tickets for the Isle of Wight ferry. There were no trains to work that day (trees on the line), so I hitched a lift in one of the mail vans that was waiting at Fareham station to get over to Portsmouth station - we didn't realize at that time that it was a full blown hurricane with 112 Knot (~130mph) winds. Rescuing ferries and fastening loose pieces of buildings and walkways made the day very interesting.
I agree. I've had more female managers over the years than male managers, working in IT. But over the last decade or so, the numbers of female IT employees has dropped off sharply at the companies where I have worked.
In my first job, in the late 80s, I would guess 30% - 40% of the IT employees at the site where I worked were female and they made up over 50% of management grades at the time. At the last software house I worked at, the number of female managers was 1, from about 10 in total.
The last couple of places I was at, there were only a couple of IT staff, although at my previous employer, my replacement is female.
Last year I bought a new smartphone, queue 6 months of adverts for new smartphones and daily emails from Amazon for new smartphones.
This year we bought a new dishwasher on Amazon. Same thing. Months of emails and adverts for dishwashers.
I've been to a couple of websites that allow you to view the cookies and disable them (wrong default!), but as there were over 100 tracking cookies on the site, it was a laborious task to go through and turn them all off! I'm guessing they are hoping most people won't look and those that do are too intimidated to take the time to disable them all.
In German you have to know the gender of the Prime Minister, because the German word for a female Prime Minister is different from a male one. There is no gender neutral version, the same goes for most job descriptions, professions etc.
But they did clean up their act a bit in the 90s, Verniedlichungen (belittlements) were dropped, you only have Mann and Frau today, Fraulein is no longer acceptable, for example. Although they are still used in certain circumstances, such as parents reprimanding their daughter or son (Sohnemann - Junior).
But AFAIK there are few or no gender neutral terms, other than "it".
Yep. In my first job, there was a guy around 60 and the company looked for voluntary redundancies. He put his hand up, got a payout for around 40 years of service (and he was on good terms, one month's money per year of service).
The company failed to do due diligence and booted him out with a gold plated boot... Only to realise at the next financial quarter reporting that he was responsible for around 40 different, undocumented systems... They tried to cancel his redundancy, but failed and ended up getting him back as a high paid contractor for 6 months to train up someone else to look after the systems!
Paris, because there is no PHB icon.
I've been made redundant a few times and each time I've been especially careful to ensure that I do everything by the book, so that I can ensure that if there are any claims for compensation, they come from me for unfair dismissal...
Twice I managed to get a decent supplementary payout, because the company messed up big time in letting me go. If I'd done something stupid like this guy, I'd have ended up paying out and sitting in jail, as opposed to sipping cocktails, sitting on a beach...
What a plonker.
Yes. But they rarely use their weapons and most reach retirement without having drawn their weapon on duty, let alone fired it outside the shooting range.
I think the statistic was for the shooting in San Bernardino, the police there fired more shots in that one incident that the whole German police force in a year. The last figure I can find is 85 shots for the whole year, 49 of which were warning shots, 15 criminals injured and 6 killed.
One of these is the Certified Against Fraud program. It allows companies to obtain the TAG Certified Against Fraud seal by complying with a set of guidelines tailored to the role a business plays in the digital ad ecosystem.
Given the council members' proclivity for distributing fraudulent ads and malware through their networks, all you can say is that self-certification is a wonderful thing.
TAG, which counts companies like Amazon, Disney, Facebook, and Google among its leadership council
There's their first problem, with regards to credibility. They shouldn't have any of those on their council. To do their advertised job, they can't have any advertising agencies on their council...
I mainly used Alta Vista in the old days, I think Yahoo! for a short while, but AV was head and shoulders above the competition, when it arrived.
But back then the 'net was small enough that you didn't need a search engine for common sites. I first used Mosaic for browsing, then Netscape. I remember going to a Microsoft event on web, where they introduced IE4, taking the CD back home and finding that it was an unreliable POS that crashed on every second page load... When it worked, it was fast, but it was just too unstable.
Using IE became inevitable though, towards the end of the 90s. I quickly switched to Pheonix, sorry, Firebirs, erm, I mean Firefox from its first beta release. 2015/16 I dallied with Edge and Chrome for a bit, but quickly switched back to Firefox.
I use DuckDuckGo for most of my searches these days.
Yes, Google Translate has real problems translating from formal English. For the longest time it didn't know what to do with the word "not" and just dropped it out of the translation completely!
Do not enter the cage, dangerous animals -> Enter the cage, dangerous animals.
I had to quickly translate an user documentation from English to German. I told my boss it would take 3 days, I was give 4 hours and told to put it through GT. I tried bunging it through Google Translate.
After I stopped rolling on the floor laughing, I went back to my boss and told him 2 - 3 days, unless he wanted it wildly inaccurate.
It converted phrases like "do not open the case, high voltage inside" to the German equivalent of "open the case, high voltage inside". I thought Google was trying to kill me... The best was "do not open the case, no user serviceable parts inside", which came out as "open the case, nothing inside", not something want to read, when handing out over $3,500 for an industrial terminal!
I've also had friends send me dissertations, auto-translated from German to English, because they have to post an English version or CVs in English. The translations are generally laughably inaccurate and don't leave a very good impression. I would say, in general, about 10-20% of what Google Translate chucks out is usable - depending on context and subject. That said, it is probably still one of the better online translation services.
My translations are generally okay, but I did an internship at a translation bureau and they are at a whole other level. Translation is a very difficult thing to do, somebody who is fluent in both languages can run rings around Google Translate, and that is still baby-steps compared to what a professional translator does.
As of 14.09.2019, António Campinos (EPO president), along with Bristows, Managing IP and others were still lobbying for software patents, in violation of EPC rules.
http://techrights.org/2019/09/14/team-upc-boosters-and-swpats/
His writing is hardly unbiased, but it was the first link I got when searching for Europe Software Patents.
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