Re: One argument in YAML's favour: a good DIFF
No. JavaScript allows trailing commas, but JSON doesn't.
1030 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jun 2010
When you're comparing the latest version with the previous version, YAML changes tend to be restricted to one line. By contrast in JSON, appending an item to an array means adding a comma to the previous line, so your DIFF highlights two lines as having changed.
As your colleague pointed out - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/29/farewell_to_macos_server/ - a few months ago, Mac OS X Server has been thoroughly gutted. Gone are the mail server, web server, VPN, and more. It's now just a tool for administering other Mac and iOS devices.
Of course you can still use a Mac Mini as a departmental server; but you'll need third party tools, and you can no longer expect Apple to support your efforts.
Price matters. Is it €0.01 per handset? If so, handset makers will pay up, and absolutely nothing will change. But the Commission probably won't accept that figure, on the basis that it's anti-competitive.
Conversely if it's €100 per handset, nobody will pay for it. Somewhere in between €0.01 and €100 there's a sweet spot: low enough to ensure mass take-up, but high enough appease the Commission.
I propose two streams. In the A-stream, you create fancy new apps with all the latest bling. Calc.exe does blockchain, notepad.exe becomes notepad.js, Paint uses AI to predict what you want to draw, etc. In the B-stream, you leave everything exactly as it is. Randomly assign users to A/B, and after a few months see which is more popular.
I was a contractor for a government body which, every week, had to record a short document into two different systems. I was asked to quote for a script which would link the two systems together, ensuring that whatever data was entered in one system would automatically be forwarded to the second.
I gave them a quote, but pointed out that the potential savings were meagre (15 minutes of clerical staff time each week) and unlikely to cover future support costs. The manager concurred and I never got the job.
But what do you do with the goods once you've brought them ashore? Let's say you've snuck in a container-load of cheap phones from Shenzhen. From a tax point of view, it's as if they'd grown on trees. Customers will still need to pay VAT on the phones when sold in shops or online. There's simply no money to be made by sneaking goods into the country undeclared.
Notable exception for cigarettes, where VAT + two forms of duty add up to over 400%. That's enough of a mark-up to attract criminal enterprises.
"Since the infection, most hospital websites have moved from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS, according to Milosevic – a move that wouldn't have halted the virus's spread but is indicative of IT staff taking security more seriously."
Or, it's indicative of IT staff fixing the easy and most visible stuff, while leaving gaping holes open elsewhere.
Not so long ago, our great government promised to award more IT contracts to small businesses and/or startups. This implies that "If the startup failed to deliver, the scheme [i.e. the government] would pay the first customer [also the government] the contract value".
Since the government has roundly failed to award more contracts to smaller suppliers, perhaps the whole principle of providing government backing to startups isn't all that wise.
Besides, any businessperson knows that landing the first contract is easy; it's the second one which proves far more difficult.
For regular bike hire schemes, popular start points are at the top of a hill and popular end points are at the bottom. Hence the need for an army of drivers to shuffle them around.
Battery-powered bicycles can go uphill quite easily, thus neatly avoiding the problem in the first place.
Yep. Recall the period from 1995 to 2012, when Windows barely changed. You could learn Windows NT 4 (released back in 1996), fall into a coma for a decade and a half, and come back to find the Windows 7 desktop experience almost exactly the same. Same for Microsoft Office, right up until that bloody ribbon. Users didn't have to re-learn everything every two years. Given how much crap we've suffered in Win8/10, I'd love to have that stability back.
Even humans aren’t that accurate.
If you’re positively identifying terror videos at that rate, you must have a huge false-positive rate. So a movie like Mad Max Fury Road, featuring fighty young people with big guns on dusty desert roads, would probably be flagged as jihadi propaganda.
I'll direct you to this handy chart of laptops with matte screens (because glossy screens are the devil's creation): https://www.productchart.co.uk/laptops/sets/1
Basically the only 17-inch options are gaming laptops such as Asus ROG (Republic Of Gamers), Dell Alienware, Acer Predator, or MSDI Dominator. There's one decent-looking HP Pavillion laptop too.
Screen size seems to be inversely proportional to screen resolution: my pocket smartphone has something approaching 4K resolution, whereas hardly any of the 17" laptops have anything more than 1920x1080.
> The logical thing to do would be to let the manufacturers innovate and produce these devices while Microsoft concentrates on the operating system, software provision and services, Azure, etc.
Just as Google are concentrating on services, and not rolling out their own line of Nexus phones, having bought up Motorola in 2014 and HTC in 2017 ?
Not to mention Apple, whose tight integration of hardware and software has long been the envy of Microsoft.
I'm not going to defend the quality of Open / Libre Office here, and I've lost track of which one is better on any given day of the week.
But if you read non-techie forums such as Mumsnet, people are actively recommending (Libre|Free)Office for home users. By pricing out those home users, Microsoft will lose valuable feeder users who both build brand loyalty and who may eventually graduate to full-blown Office.
At £119 for Office Home, it's looking expensive. Apple's iWork is free (though granted it's not nearly as powerful); LibreOffice provides maybe 80% of the same features & quality for free.
The old Microsoft Works was just £40. Microsoft desperately need something at that price point to hook new users in; otherwise they don't have that valuable chain of users migrating from Works to full-blown Office as their needs expand.
I'd like a button to export the configuration from one server as a text file (like Puppet etc.), then import it into another server. Far better than our current approach of trying to play spot-the-difference between two servers, where one is behaving and the other is not.
Bought a Samsung Galaxy S8 for the missus. Ordered through a 3rd party seller on Amazon UK. Paid roughly 17% less than the version sold by Amazon themselves. Ordered on Saturday, dispatched same day, received the following Wednesday. No mention of VAT on the receipt.
It is trivially easy to evade VAT in this manner; and it's obviously not illegal. The government does need to change the law to create a level playing field for both domestic and overseas sellers.
I just wish we had some stability. Ever tried writing for the browser in 2017? The toolchain keeps changing. We had jQuery, then React, then Angular. Building it required Grunt, then Gulp, SystemJS then Webpack. Modules went from AMD to UMD to CommonJS to something else. Package management moved from Bower to NPM to Yarn and back to NPM again.
Examples and quickstart projects which compiled perfectly six months ago no longer work because somewhere a package was upgraded. Answers on StackOverflow are irrelevant because they applied to version 1.3.5, and you're using version 2.7.1 now. Bugs on Github are left open, with not even a WONTFIX comment from the developers.
Not so long ago I remember a world where major tools were upgraded every 2-3 years. Windows XP was standard for over a decade. VB6 even longer. We had years to learn the quirks of IE6's "quirks mode". Nowadays if your Github project isn't on a six-week release cycle, it's abandonware.
I'd take a sabbatical if I could, but my skills would be worthless by the time I return.
All of the above problems are magnified on a CI system, because half the tools don't log to stderr or set the error code correctly.
Edit: this guy nailed it: https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f
They'll be using the U.S. Census Bureau's definitions: https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
"Asian" means both Oriental and Subcontinental (India/Pakistan), but not Middle-Eastern (they count as White).
"White" includes Europe, North Africa, and the Middle-East.