Posts by veti 4492 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
Yep, I've always loathed Outlook, but pretty much everyone I work with - including the IT department - is only, at best, dimly aware that there are other ways of handling email.
And appointments.
And room bookings.
And to-do lists. And... well, admittedly it can get a bit complicated. But still, if Outlook could just be expunged forever from every computer in my employer's company, I'd be a happy bunny.
This is true, but it's also true that LibreOffice developers tend to try to work through specs and, when they encounter such ambiguities or inconsistencies, don't even think to ask the question - they'll quietly "resolve" it in some way that makes sense to them, sometimes without even noticing it.
A more disciplined development community would insist on a culture of questioning and escalating issues until they could be authoritatively resolved, but that sort of discipline is precisely what LO lacks.
Ok, there's lots to criticise in MS Word, but to insinuate that it's "not (even) marginally usable" is just plain silly. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide struggle through the issues somehow. The evidence that it is at least marginally usable - is, frankly, much stronger than you could muster for any of its competitors.
Lots of countries like to brag about their effective treatments. But the best evidence is, none of them are really all that effective. They still brag, because it makes their leaders look stronger and look like they're doing something to help their people - but like Trump with his hydroxychloroquine, they're just overselling something that might have helped some tiny number of people but - at best - doesn't work for most.
Iran got hit early. If their treatment was "reasonably effective", at four months in they wouldn't still be losing a full 5% of their cases, and that's just the official figures.
The trouble with "correcthorsebatterystaple" is, it doesn't scale. If we all start using "three or four common words strung together", then attackers will start guessing passwords in that format. There's only about 20,000 English words in common use (of which most people only use about 2000-4000 on a regular basis), so the guessing space there is not nearly as big as you probably imagine.
As long as only a small minority uses it, it's excellent. But when attackers start expecting it, it suddenly becomes much weaker than a randomly generated string of characters.
If Hutchins had sold malware but only to state actors, then he too could have made the same defence. As it is, though, the cases are not comparable.
The point is, if it's not a crime when a state does it, then you can't coherently charge someone with abetting a crime by helping them do it.
I don't think FB's business model depends on people trusting their deepest secrets to their phones. They're in the advertising business, not espionage.
They're upset because if their tool isn't secure, people might look for others instead, and once your users start looking for alternatives to your products there's no telling what they might find.
Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be easily explained by common-or-garden greed.
Times New Roman is fine for the environment it was designed for, which is multiple narrow columns of fully justified text.
In any other kind of layout, it's just too horrible to look at. If your lines are more than about 20 ems wide, then for Garamond's sake choose a different font.
CamelCase doesn't replace spaces, it augments them. You still need spaces to, y'know, indicate the gaps between words. Putting such random punctuation in the middle of a word may be annoying, but it's not nearly the worst offence. (That would be reserved for those cupid stunts who insist that their company's or product's name should be written in all lower case, including the initial letter. Bonus points if they try to compensate by using a different font whenever they write it themselves. Aargh.)
We could certainly do without capitalisation if we had to. Many languages (check out most Asian languages, or Arabic f'rinstance) don't have a concept of capitals at all, and they seem to get along without them.
But it's not clear how it would benefit us to do away with them. Their benefit may be marginal, but let's face it, we can use all the help we can get at reading comprehension.
There is never a good reason to "hit the right-justify button".
The correct longhand way to do it is to define a paragraph style with the right-justified attribute, then apply that style to the text you want to appear that way.
The quick and dirty way, if you can't be bothered with that, is <Ctrl-R>, which takes a fraction of the time of taking your hands off the keyboard to move a mouse to find a button on a toolbar.
Either way, the button is just wrong.
You are aware that the "serial comma", also known as the "Oxford comma", is the more traditional British usage? It's one of a handful of instances ('-ize' at the end of words being another) where British English chose to 'modernize' itself and American English stayed with the older usage. The OED to this day supports both the comma and '-ize'.
As for your legibility argument: again, are you aware that when you post a comment online, HTML will remove any extra spaces you type in? Look here: how many spaces do you see directly after the colon? (Hint, I stopped counting after 20.) So you've been happily reading, and posting, text without the extra spaces for as long as you've been online.
On the contrary, the Oxford comma, after languishing for several decades, is enjoying a comeback right now.
Nobody cares about readability of CSS because nobody writes it by hand. We have tools that can do the job better, for any value of "better" that values results vs effort as opposed to outmoded concepts such as brevity or efficiency.
"Personal responsibility" means that the rich get to do what they want and the poor do what they're told, which is to stay poor and die in much larger numbers. You can see this unfolding in the USA right now. Trump/governors can indeed drive people back to work by stopping the flow of money to them, but it's the poorest who will be forced back first, the rich can afford to sit on their butts for a few more weeks.
This won't be over when lockdown ends. World Wars 1 and 2 saw a huge social levelling. (So for that matter did the black death, in medieval Europe.) If that doesn't happen this time around, then the reckoning from that failure will make the pandemic itself look like a picnic.
It's still "accessing and abusing the information" that is the crime, not "using the computer".
It's like if someone drove a car down a pedestrian precinct, heedless of the damage and distress as people leap out of their way. You don't prosecute them for "driving the car", you prosecute them for "driving it dangerously".
Seriously, why won't it end when the pandemic ends?
What do you think the government is going to say, then, that will inspire people not only to keep the app installed on their phones, with full permissions, but also to keep Bluetooth on 24/7, with the added battery drain that imposes?
And reinstall the same app with the same ID on each new phone they get?
If there were a central database being maintained by a process we had no power to control, then sure, I'd worry about that. But that's the opposite of what this article is talking about.
I know there's a popular right-wing talking point that says "governments never voluntarily give up power". But, at least as far as western sorta-democracies are concerned, that's bullshit. Governments take up extra powers during an emergency, then lay them down afterwards, all the time. It's happened in every major natural and non-natural disaster for the past century.
At least they're giving some warning. That puts them streets ahead of some exchanges I remember.
My money would be on the "failing business model" explanation. Lots of people think they can do what some established business does only cheaper - but only because they don't actually understand what the business involves. The more they get into it, the more they realise there's a reason why it costs.
... then how about flagging it to the user when they try to post the comment? Give them a message, something like:
"Our algorithm has detected that this comment may be perceived as 'unfriendly'. Please review and consider rephrasing if appropriate."
It's better than seeing your comment disappear after the event.
A toilet is not exactly a friendly environment to most things, the less you have to put in there the better. And outside the khazi itself is the bathroom, which is not much better from the perspective of electronics.
What bothers me is the thought of what it will take to keep it clean.
Just out of interest, what do you consider to be an acceptable number of Americans to die under this strategy?
Presumably, if you believed it would kill 100 million people, you wouldn't advocate it. But if it kills 100 people, and it very clearly would be way more than that, then you're fine with that. So there's a tipping point somewhere between those figures. I'm wondering - whereabouts would you put it?
It's clear why Trump wants the country to get back to normal quickly: the shutdown is costing him personally big money. (Mind you, since he didn't close anything in the first place, he doesn't actually have the power to end it anyway.) What's your reasoning?
Yeah - no. Not even a little bit.
It's precisely the kind of overreach that will provoke a furious backlash from the authors and publishers - of which this is only the beginning - and who still currently have the law on their side. If copyright reform is the goal, the IA has just set it back by 20 years or more.
"Controlled digital lending" was a trial balloon that might possibly have been upheld or enshrined in actual law sooner or later. But that depended on it being possible to make a plausible argument that it wouldn't be abused. Well, that plausible argument just got blown clean out of the water.
Are you being encouraged to go through your neighbours' trash and dob them in for wasting food? How about listening to foreign radio stations, is that illegal yet?
If not, then you haven't yet reached the level of intrusiveness that Britain adopted during WW2 - and then dropped immediately afterwards.
Actually, when you're talking about language - as opposed to a question that can be resolved with scientific investigation - it kinda does.
The purpose of language is communication. The most effective communication is the one that's most widely understood. If the measure of success is "effectiveness", then that's case closed.
If you have some other measure you'd prefer to use, then please share.
Front page headlines like this, you mean?
Here is a more measured treatment of the same topic. Bottom line, yes, funding really has gone up by about that much.
Sadly, since the pound crashed after the referendum and has never really recovered (until just now, indeed, but who knows how long that will last), all this money doesn't actually buy very much of anything.
Apple and the pharma companies were in a different situation. They weren't profiteering from an emergency, they were making out doing business-as-usual.
That's an important difference. If you see someone doing that, the correct remedy is to start up your own business and compete with them, offering what they offer but at a very-slightly more reasonable price, and thus the assumption is that the price will come down until it's "fair".
Emergencies break this system, because it takes time to happen. But when Apple has been (as many say) gouging their customers for years, and still competition hasn't stopped them from doing it, the rational explanation is that they are offering some sort of value to their customers that others can't replicate at a lower price. Quite possibly their competitors can't even understand what that value is.
Our supermarkets imposed item limits weeks ago - no more than two per customer of (canned food), (pasta/noodles/rice), (tissues), (toilet paper), (handwash/sanitiser) and a bunch of other goods that are in demand. Of course you could get around it by taking multiple trips if you really wanted to, but I didn't see anyone taking advantage of that loophole. Who has the time?
All imposed unilaterally by the supermarkets, weeks before the lockdown.
If you can physically get to a supermarket, you can get any of those things now. (Well, except pasta. There's a real drought of that.)
You should have stopped using W7 before January, when "coronavirus" was a footnote in the news about how China was covering something up. That was the deadline that you were informed of at least nine years ago. If you missed it and you're only just getting around to thinking about it now - well, tough, but I don't think you can blame anyone but yourself for that.
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