Posts by Doctor Syntax 33064 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"hence why the data is being uploaded"
And yet it's possible for the mobile phone in my car to have its voice commands processed locally. How old is this advanced tech? Well, I remember a mobile phone with voice control being launched in 1986 (Topaz in the old BT Mobile catalogue).
"Actually, there is one solution"
There's another which was John Brown's solution above. Give an audible warning when it starts live. And let's not stint, a nice flashing red light as well. It should be possible to do this locally but even if it isn't, all input when it's not live is sampled for wake-up detection and then goes straight to /dev/null.
There's an implication (but not an outright explicit statement) that training had been given. If that's so and the other trainees didn't have this problem then one should exonerate the trainers.
In any case she'd been told that this is the way it's supposed to be used, that it's not an error for Microsoft to fix. If she couldn't accept being corrected by someone whose job it is to know then I think there's a reason to escalate the issue, IT manager to her line manager. Frankly, she needed to be kept away from sharp objects. Am I the only one who can see the dangers if she had access to email? At least she left and became SEP.
"you don't save it on your machine anymore, everything is saved in the cloud"
But what did you do to save it on your machine? And why should you do something different just to save in in the cloud? After all, "the cloud" is just somebody else's machine. There's no implication that you do something different. Even if you misunderstood the first time you should be prepared to accept correction from someone whose job is to know.
"So continual saving means a new file format designed for that."
ODF formats have "flat" versions, i.e. not zipped and compressed. I thought that maybe they were intended for use with versioning systems built on diffs - SCCS, git and anything in between - which would overcome this. But no, elements are sequence numbered and a small change near the start causes the rest of the elements to be renumbered when the file is saved. It's no more suited to that than MS Office formats.
Clearly it would be possible for a file format intended to be saved economically in versions. It would also enable remote saving by means of a proper client server protocol instead of relying on emulation of a file system, something that would help protect against ransomware.
Perhaps it's time to start thinking of a new, open format based on these lines.
"It's also annoying that 2 days later her parents contacted the school complaining that 'we'd' lost her data and refused to help her get it back"
Does the school emphasis - from the start - that multiple copies must be saved? It would be good practice to run spot checeks with students; "How many save copies do you have? When did you last save one?".
"Some marketing moron"
More likely the moron would be a beancounter totting up the "losses" on the licenses - price of everything and value of nothing etc. Much as I expect marketing to be staffed entirely by morons I suspect that this time it was marketing who realised the consequences.
A good rule of thumb is that authorisation to roll out a change includes authorisation to roll it back in an emergency. It shouldn't need someone else to be consulted.
A second is that if things go pear-shaped promptly on rolling out a change it should be rolled back PDQ. Even if the problem was actually something else you're no worse off than you were before and at least you now know it wasn't the change.
However this is the way to handle the PR side - not the self-serving, transparently untrue boilerplate response we usually get. It actually raises Cloudflare's reputation.
"Isn't Jeremy Hunts solution to leaving the EU ... the UK drops its corporation tax to the same level as Ireland to attract ... multi-nationals"
The prerequisite to this is that the national economy* is relatively small compared to the size of the revenue that the multinationals put through that facility, otherwise the fall in revenue from native businesses exceeds the gains. Up to now that's ot been met. Leaving the EU might achieve that, however but I'm not sure it's a good achievement to make.
* Normally the consequence of being a smallish country with a smallish population.
"As a revenue tax targeted on a narrowly defined set of companies, the Digital Services Tax is not one of those smart measures. It risks making investing in the UK less attractive"
Investing? I think he means "selling in". The tax gets charged irrespective of whether they invest or not. In fact the whole thing could be structured so that real investments are offset against income.
"Third, you don't want X thousands of FB shareholders screaming to their congresscritters"
The people at whom they should scream are FB manglement for getting into this position. And FB manglement are pretty well insulated from this because one of them has a controlling vote.
"set aside $3bn in anticipation of an FTC smack-down, leaving the biz with $2.43bn in profit"
This could be clearer but I'm interpreting this to mean that of the $5bn they had to root down the side of the cushions for $2bn because they'd already put $3bn in the swear box. So the profits for the first quarter would have been $4.43bn. Pro rate that means that annual profits are of the order of $17 to $18bn. But that $3bn set aside had to have come from somewhere, presumably profits in some other quarter. Even if the cost of the fine was spread over multiple quarters it must still have come from overall profits and is well over a quarter of that pro-rate estimated annual profits.
If I were an ordinary shareholder I'd be a bit narked to find that the business's playing silly buggers had resulted in a fine of over a quarter of a year's profits. In fact, I might be inclined to vote against the board at the next AGM. Of course, this being Facebook that would have no effect whatsoever due to the strange share structure.
It's one thing to state things in an indictment (or "Bluster" might be a better word) and another to produce evidence to that effect in court. It seems unlikely that they'll ever have to do the latter so they cold actually claim it included a solution to the travelling salesman problem if they wanted.
"Suggest you visit a logistics company. I think the (largely off-the-shelf) systems they use to track packages through their distribution and delivery network are more than capable of handling rail freight."
Evidence says they're all too often not capable of tracking stuff through their own networks. It's OK when everything goes as it should but the use cases for nicked stuff, failure to deliver or whatever are due in some much later sprint.
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