Posts by allthecoolshortnamesweretaken 6157 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2015
"As a workaround, train operators could ensure that no aspect of the journey is in any way entertaining."
Whaddaya mean, "could"? In my experience they are alredy pretty good at that even without using any computer aid.
Re "possible paths between trains' operational systems ans passenger entertainment systems" - are we going to see high speed trains being hacked like, say a Jeep Cherokee?
"The real question here is how do we produce an OS that completely denies all admin level privilege to the end-user, also lets them do what they want, where installation / upgrade / additional software is all controlled by professionals and its health is continually monitored by same?"
Part 3 of your suggestion (which I like) simply comes down to the willingness of the end user to pay for it. Part 1 and part 2 seem somewhat mutually exclusive.
IIRC an article on El Reg from a couple of days before, Red Star OS pretty much nails part 1. Not so hot on part 2, though.
Well, here'a a xkcd to cheer you up.
I wholeheartedly agree! On the other hand, I do like a good euphemsm, must be all the Monty Python* I've been exposed to. As to the question of an afterlife: I've put that on the back burner. One day I'll know, but it can wait.
* Yes, that one. Just for a change, the german version: Dieser Papagei ist tot!
Oh, go ahead and say it: CANCER. Haven't you learned anything from Harry Potter? "The disease that must not be named." Cancer has been a part of my life by proxy for the last ten years - my better half went through two rounds of breast cancer so far, and there is no guarantee there won't be a third one. As 'cells growing in your body' is a normal thing per se, we will maybe never be able to prevent or cure all kinds of cancer. But every year research makes progress, and just a couple of years can make a world of difference, especially in the treatments and protocols that are availiable. Still, cancer is and will be one of the horrible facts of life that exist - and it won't go away by ignoring it.
Well, looks like that electric car guy and the other guy from that bookstore are making headway into private space flight. Once that works on a regular basis, automated orbital factories are the next logical step. Sadly, the first factories will be making stuff that won't advance humankind as such, but stuff that fetches sky-high prices - my money would be on SuperViagra and weaponry of some kind or other.
@Steven Roper: as I can give you only one upvote, have a pint. (Where is the champagne, it's New Years Eve!) As the datasette was notoriously unreliable, the next thing I got was a floppy drive...
One point, though: I don't think IT technology has peaked yet - it's the implementation that sucks. Big time. [Insert rant HERE] Is there a xkcd for that? You bet there is.
Yes, this sort of thing works, but you have got to have both the time and the inclination, so this is not for everyone. But if you do, it can be fun - wasting some direct marketing guy's time until he hangs up in frustration, this feels really great. Instead of acing stupid or something like that you can also open with "sounds interesting - but first I'd like to talk to you about our Lord and Saviour for a minute". That usually does the trick much, much faster. Oh, and when you get calls from the guys who want to talk religion, open with "sounds interesting - but first I'd like to talk to you about sex for a minute". That also works fine.
"Of course, in the long run any enterprise that gives up its inhouse capabilities entirely will suffer the same way clients addicted to Oracle and SAP suffer now, but that kind of long term thinking rarely plays a role in CFO thinking."
Exactly. That's just trading one dependence for another. Hell, in some companies /corporations it's difficult enough to control your own IT.
I have no data to back this up, but my gut tells me that at least half the decisions to "move our IT stuff into the cloud" are not based on rational thought and reasoned analysis whether this is a good move for the company, but on the old "everybody is doing it, so we must do it too".
xkcd did it years ago, and did it proper
"a day of fumbling, and most users are adept at substitutions"
From my experience - nope. Most users are not even close to being adept at the original. Hell, if I'd had 1 EUR for every question like 'how do I insert an extra column in my Excel page' I could have retired years ago.
Probably true, this sort of thing did happen... the first big court case over illegal copies of software in Germany folded because the guy who was in charge of doing an inventory of seized evidence did just that: used a hole punch and filed a big, big stack of 5.25" floppies neatly into binders. They were listed in the inventory as "square objects made out of plastic, lenth of a side 13,335 cm". (By then, a lot of people thought all computer data was stored on tapes or punch cards. If they made the connection 'computer', 'data' and 'storage' at all...)
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