Posts by Doctor Syntax 33045 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Back in the day we were analyst/programmers. That meant that we actually talked to users, possibly at their desks to observe processes,* to find out what they did and coded up a solution. Of course that sort of thing was liable to make several layers of manglement unhappy because it didn't need their high-ceremony processes. As a result it seems to have got stamped on rather heavily.
*Remote working wouldn't have made that easy.
"If my Magic Doohickey synchronises with my Phone using some discoverable server in a vendor specific cloud, there is no easy answer when the discoverable server stops existing."
Here are a few:
1. Require it to be able to synchronise with your iPhone over your WiFi. It means you can't contact it remotely unless you open your network for incoming connections from your phone. But it's a non-bricking fall-back.
2. Have a manual mode as fall-back.
3. Make it clear to purchasers before buying that you have not made any provision for ongoing operation of the service, that you cannot guarantee to keep operating the service and that if the service lapses the product is bricked. And see how many sales you get then.
TL;DR design your device to fall-back sensibly or tell the customer very clearly they're about to buy a pig in a poke.
" Companies will work around it, or avoid it altogether."
To be effective and prevent work-rounds it needs to make the entire marketing chain - yes, eBay, that means you - responsible.
Avoiding a well regulated market if you want to ship shoddy goods is quite acceptable to the market. If the manufacturers have a problem with that there's no point coming to me for sympathy. Innovation is no excuse for cutting corners or making customers act as QA.
"Products will be launched where early fixes and revisions are tolerated, and maybe taken to Europe a few years later."
Excellent - up to a point. That means the EU gets good products and elsewhere gets the crap. Up to a point because here in the UK we no longer get that protection.
If the current year is meant then a day and month should be sufficient. If provision is made to enter a 2 digit year then the sensible default is to that closest to the current year which is what the user is most likely to expect.
Historical dates are a nightmare. E.g. the archivist classified something as "Early C14th" but looking at it I suspect it could be before another dated in the 1290s and none of the witnesses who are found in other, dated, documents are exclusively C14th.
I've used LibreOffice entering dates - as 4 digits - back to the C12th. I have no problem with using 4 digit formats. But if the year is set to 2 digits the default should be what a user might find most reasonable and I doubt a date almost a century ago compared to one a few years ahead is not likely to be considered reasonable.
This might have been reasonably considered Good Practice back in 1999 but I can't imagine anyone being able to put forward a cogent argument for its being that almost a quarter of a century later.
the millennium bug was mostly "an overblown scam to suck money into the tech industry"
It's not so long ago that I posted this here, as I have done a few times before but obviously it needs to be repeated:
I had a client who had a non-Y2K compatible version of their accounts S/W. Their old alleged hot standby server (also previously commented on) wouldn't run the newer version so both servers were replaced and UAT completed to the accountants' satisfaction. We planned to cut over between Christmas & New Year. The accountants chickened out and wouldn't let us until they'd closed out 1999 accounts in mid January. It was a torrid couple of weeks with the vendors dialling in (a modem on a serial port!) several times each week to fix the data.
Yes, Y2K really was a genuine problem.
The headline says "fines" but the article says "damages". As it's a civil suit being launched on behalf of publishers the latter makes more sense. Personally I have no objection to ad-merchants slogging it out between themselves indefinitely. My lack of sympathy is equally distributed.
"Firstly you can put a condition in the license that states that use of the open source component in any commercial application is at the company's own risk, and that the authors of the component do not accept any responsibility for legal problems that this might cause the company."
Something along these lines is fairly standard.
I know Ptolemy is regarded as having done a good job regarding details of rivers etc but his was a distant view. The Romans who were actually occupying part of the island were in no doubt that there was only one island called Britannia. Their only distinction was between two provinces within the island.
I doubt Ptolemy was ever consulted about what Wikipedia refers to as the "shared etymology" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany). cf Bretagne vs Grand Bretagne.
"Is Charles the King of Northern Ireland?"
The title is King of the United Kingsdon of Great Britain* and Northern Ireland.
* Great Britain to distinguish the island from Brittany to where a lot of Britons emigrated after the Anglo-Saxons arrived in what was to become England.
Parliament wasn't quite the same thing in middle ages as it is now so you could extend that beyond Charles I. Richard II might be considered an example of that.
But you quote the OP saying "or exiling" and that includes James II as well as Edward VII and even Charles II temporarily.
"Her husband, the late Prince Philip, was less tech savvy. In an infamous case, his personal account on Prestel etc."
I'm not sure about that. It would have taken a degree of tech savvy to have used a Prestel account but even more to the point I think he organised a conference promoting technology many decades ago.
She was working up until two days before her death at 96. Only ill her final illness prevented her holding a meeting the following day. Charles is about 5 years younger than myself. He's stepping up to the next role. I'd already been retired for years at his age.
Rich or not it isn't a fate I'd wish on my worst enemy but I'm grateful that they both accepted it. It means succession to head of state is pre-determined, doesn't involve vote grubbing (whoever you vote for you always get a politician) and is beyond the disgraceful events we saw recently in the US.
"his mother deliberately kept him away from any meaningful exercise of royal powers even in her old age"
The reality is that he and the other senior members of the family stepped in to substitute for her on more and more occasions in recent years. And short of an actual regency there's no scope for anyone other than the monarch exercising royal powers in any way, meaningful or otherwise.
"years were counted from the date a new sovereign accessed his throne"
That was certainly how a lot of legal documents were dated so you need to know on what date in the year the accession fell. An entire published volume of the Wakefield Manorial Rolls has a classic off-by-one error, presumably by misinterpreting that.
I may have mentioned this before. Our resident electronics engineer looked after silent alarms for the police - prerecorded messages broadcast on a police wavelength. Most area were on the new UHF systems but there was at leas one on the old VHF and the TX's for that were valve based. He showed me one that had just been returned with a mummified mouse curled up under a valve base.
The mysterious thing is that no matter how disliked the product they still sell.
Or maybe it's not so mysterious. They have effective monopolies. If the user is in their walled garden then they have no option. That in turn explains why there is so much diversity in the FOSS world. There is no walled garden.. There are options and we take advantage of them.
" If you had any experience of the pre GUI application software, all command line and text menus, and the huge problems ordinary users had gaining even a basic grasp of a limited set of functionality, then you might start to comprehend what a huge leap forward GUI's were."
Puts hand up.
Yes, I was there.
As analyst programmers, DBAs & sysadmins we could see the command line but the users didn't. The users got a text menu system to take them to applications and the applications also had text menus. No faffing about with mice, everything could be done from the keyboard. You might not grok this but it was an efficient way of working. So were the text-based,curses driven IDEs we used so we didn't necessarily spend as much time at the command line as you might think.
And there were far less queries of "How do I do....?". What you need to realise is that the commentards here are all too often on the receiving end of those queries. I can only assume that your ivory tower insulates you from those. We see your failures and are all too familiar with them.
Torvalds does the kernel, not the UI nor even the rest of userland*. So there's one thing you clearly didn't know.
And do you know why there are so many Linux desktop environments?
Because the layering of the underlying software makes it possible, because there is no marketing involved so if someone sufficiently talented doesn't like what they're offered they can roll their own and because there are people with different use cases and preferences to keep them all in use.
* Look this term up if it puzzles you.
"The average user (whether an individual buying for themselves, or management in a business) has no clue about improvements under the hood and will buy on the basis of visible features and bling."
Nobody knows whether there are changes under the hood or not. A change of UI can hide the possibility that there are few or none. But although the first impression might be "Modern" or "Ooo, shiny" the reality soon sets in if usability is compromised or it turns out that resources dedicated to the surface glitz might have been better spent on the quality and functionality of what's actually under the hood.
"One of the things I wish the open source world would do more of is just throw things at the wall to see what sticks."
They've done a fair amount of that and do you know what happens? For the most part users stick with what works for them. For a few that may be exploring the latest shiny. For the rest of us it's KDE, XFCE or whatever. It's particularly noticeable that when Gnome decided to make big changes between versions 2 & 2 the response was not just one but two new projects, Cinnamon and Mate to preserve the original UI. There should be some lessons in that.
And we now have a whole field of UX (User Experience) which is all about "delighting" the user and puts emotions and feelings above rational
And yet even there they fail. Nobody here is delighted with their offerings. They may have succeeded in generating emotions and feelings but not good ones.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
