Posts by Wensleydale Cheese

Re: Maybe

"microsoft are mutating into the Sirus cybernetics corp"

I think I first realised that about 15 years ago.

Re: "PROfessional" or "PROsumer"?

"It looks someone at MS fails to understand the needs of many PROfessionals who uses their computer for true work - often very important, not only to them - but are alone, or working in small teams."

This pretty much describes the situation of several family businesses I know. Think successful businesses with niche specialities, and one or two employees apiece.

Enterprise licencing is not only total overkill for them, but could they even buy it for less than half a dozen PCs?

"At what point in the article does it mention anything about ATMs with wifi?

The last sentence in the article.

Re: Administrate

Well this is in my OS X Dictionary:

administrate |ədˈmɪnɪstreɪt|

mid 16th cent.: from Latin administrat- ‘managed’, from the verb administrare (see administer) .

Re: Law of Unintended Consequences

"Not once they classify envelopes as a form of end-to-end encryption"

Postcards only.

After all, you've nothing to hide.

Have you?

Generation gap: Tupperware is so 60s/70s to me

"Tupperware is so 80s"

Ahem. According to Wiki

Tupperware spread to Europe in 1960 when Mila Pond hosted a Tupperware party in Weybridge, England

As result of our parents' devotion to the stuff, my generation saw Tupperware as distinctly uncool.

flying cupboards

"last thing you want are cupboards flying around all over the shop.."

Misread that as "ship" and had a mental picture of what happens if you don't fasten stuff securely when afloat,

Gercher

"I would like to know what Gercher derives from"

Probably short for something like "Get yer arse/ugly mug out of here", cf "Gotcha".

also see Gercha! - "London Slang: a mild threat as if to say 'what a load of rubbish !' or 'get out of here !'."

Re: Redefining failures as success

"Multiple deployments a day?"

It sounds like what I know as "Continuous fire-fighting" i.e. putting out lots of small fires rather than addressing the cause.

It can be satisfying because it keeps you busy, busy, busy, but ultimately, how productive is it?

Re: Why is there a picture of Lake Geneva...

They've fixed that now with a piccie of the River Limmat in Zurich.

Plus some unknown lass.

Re: ZFS

While I'm sure Oracle's purchase of Sun was part of Apple's decision to drop ZFS, they withdrew from the server market at the same time.

OS X 10.7 (Lion Server), the first one to be bundled as a (significantly cheaper) add-on to the base OS was released in February 2011 without ZFS).

Many are happily using ZFS now, but letting it loose on consumer kit 5 years ago was going to be one hell of a risk.

BA

"Having flown with them many times, I always have sympathy for BA customers"

I've avoided BA for many years now and I'd consider paying a premium to go with someone else.

Re: I would never

Quality stores never add this shit, but the mass market ripoff stores do in spades and should be avoided IMO.

The last HP laptop I had to deal with was full of the stuff, from HP itself.

After wiping and reinstalling from the manufacturer's disc, it took me over an hour to identify and zap all the extra crud HP had installed.

Re: Just closed

"The big question is 'were you able to wipe all your data', or is it still there lurking on their servers for MS to slurp as necessary?"

A recent set of emails from LinkedIn would suggest that yes, they still have some details (e.g. email addy) related to the account i closed about 4 years ago.

That might have been no more than a last minute drive to boost member numbers before the takeover, but we'll probably never know.

Re: Atlantis claims were obviously wrong

"BOOMwupsygeologicalfaultgluglluglug"

That phrase is worth 100 upvotes on its own.

Sadly I can only give you one.

Re: There is *something* somewhere ...

"Or perhaps on a person's wrist with a band to anchor it."

When I enquired of a young lady why she used her phone for the time rather than a wristwatch, her answer was "A wristwatch ruins the suntan".

Sometimes you just can't win.

Re: Still copying Apple

"Samsung Kies regularly provoked kernel panics on mine. Got rid of the Mac and got a PC instead, problem solved."

The 2013 version of Samsung Kies for OS X was such a pile of poo that I got rid of it. Blowing it away was considerably cheaper than replacing my Mac.

The Credits file hadn't been updated from the out of the box Xcode defaults for the time:

"Engineering: Some people ... With special thanks to: Mom"

Samsung Kies: Even the Developers Don't want to Take Credit!

HR works its own brand of magic again

"To thank us, they paid us all double time for the hours worked, specifically including the hour skipped when the clocks went forward."

HR managed to do the reverse of that once.

I was a subcontractor on this one:

The project was a server upgrade for a customer during an Easter weekend plant shut down, and the agreed pay was x per day for 7 days straight, to include customer training after the upgrade.

HR somehow got involved and insisted that we'd want Good Friday through to Easter Monday as an unpaid holiday.

I politely said "No thanks".

According to my German-English dictionary

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen selbst Götter vergebens.

With stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

Re: Great article

ts not Victorian technology. Its Edwardian (Heath) technology IIRC.

I thought Ted Heath was a lawyer. Or Big Band leader, take your pick.

Re: Oh Boy !

+ "central role"

Re: Is he German by any chance?

Nope

"Vinod Khosla (Gurmukhi: ਵਿਨੋਦ ਖੋਸਲਾ; born 28 January 1955) is an Indian/American businessman..."

Re: Needn't stay on paper/micro

"Having worked on many very large backscan conversions for financial clients (jobs with resultant repositories in the 10s of TB), it's very possible that any old paper, fiche or film files would have been converted at some point in the past and form a fair chunk of this 2.6TB."

Yep, did a much smaller project like that back in 1992, which is 24 years ago. Think legal departments who wanted easy access to contracts stretching back years.

Re: Bah!

Have an up vote for the Cobol observation.

Another problem I came across in Cobol days was the amount of folklore around about what constructs were efficient or not, usually gleaned from a previous course for a different compiler written for a different hardware architecture.

It made sense to benchmark such claims yourself, and it was not uncommon that they turned out to be false for the compiler/hardware combination you were now using,

Re: 'Keeps trying to sell me something called 'DevOps'...

And bacon sarnies.

Just preaching to the converted, really.

Re: The price baloons. To what exactly?

"I expect we Europeans will have to wait until 22/July for delivery!"

Our maths teacher always told us that 22/7 wasn't accurate enough.

Which is quite appropriate for advertised delivery dates :-)