Posts by barbara.hudson

Re: Obligatory...

Ever try to use your windshield wipers without windshield washer? Dust and grit will make permanent scratches.

Re: Maybe the NSF needs to find more scifi movies to location shoot at Arecibo?

"There's coal on Mars" should do it.

They don't have to understand

This is targeted at PHBs. They only have to believe they can do it long enough to sign a contract. Dunning-Kruger approved this message.

That's because they have to make documentation that takes up more pages and is more opaque - otherwise, it looks too easy and thus must be worth (and paid) less. IOW, they're acting like they're paid by the word.

Prove it? How?

Just how is anyone supposed to prove that they've deleted the data off of said laptop, short of mailing it back to him and letting him browse through it after fixing it so he can log onto it without accessing the company network?

Or inviting him in to delete it himself (a sticky and potentially unpleasant situation for all involved when dealing with a fired employee)?

Others have pointed out that the company already has his personal information, but that's irrelevant. The laptop will probably be re-assigned to someone who won't have the right to that information, and it's not like every company re-images every computer before handing it out to the next user.

Re: Really? It's not a joke.

You're wrong, both about your claim that "police make the laws" in Canada, and the Queen. Legally, the Queen of Canada is a separate entity from the Queen of England - they just both happen to be embodied in Elizabeth II.

Next time you pull out a $20 bill, that's the Queen of Canada on it. Or just look at the Wikipedia entry for "Monarchy of Canada": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada

"Although the person of the sovereign is equally shared with 15 other independent countries within the Commonwealth of Nations, each country's monarchy is separate and legally distinct.[23] As a result, the current monarch is officially titled Queen of Canada and, in this capacity, she, her consort, and other members of the Canadian Royal Family undertake public and private functions domestically and abroad as representatives of Canada. However, the Queen is the only member of the Royal Family with any constitutional role."

Only the federal government has jurisdiction over criminal law, which is why Canada, unlike the US, has one criminal code for the whole country. Provinces are in charge of civil laws, which is why civil laws can vary from province to province or territory. Provinces cannot make any activity a criminal offense.

Canada is not a republic, and judging from the insanity south of the border, that's a good thing. Then again, there's also the crazies knee-capping the UK by pushing for Brexit.

Maybe Canada can take your place in the EU. It would certainly give more leverage when dealing with Trump's trade protectionism.

Re: Crikey - $800???

Taking it on an airplane? Have fun when "they" want to search all your data before you board. After all, it's enough out of the ordinary to warrant extra attention. Encryped? "Your keys, please."

Re: Possible or easy?

"But two things that ARE needed, depending on where the person wishing to use an application is coming from, are functional documentation - what the available functions of a piece of code actually do, and application documentation - why you would want to use any given function."

If you have all the functional documentation, then you should be able to determine what functions you need to use to do what YOU want to do - not expect the function's authors to predict how you would use it. If that were the case, you wouldn't need the functional documentation.

Which is just another way of saying that there are different needs for different users. End users don't need functional documentation, they just need to know how to achieve what they want. Developers don't need application documentation, because they're the ones developing the application.

(And while writing the documentation before writing the application sounds good in theory, you'll usually find that what seems good in theory is too inflexible in practice. And who has the time to change the documentation? Certainly not the dweeb who wrote it and then says "I've done the hard part, now you just write the code."

Re: The guy's a bigot

@Adam52 wrote "'I've no idea why people quote pay gap statistics. They are almost entirely meaningless, because they aggregate all employees together, regardless of role, unless you're arguing for a pure socialist society."

Shouldn't the aggregate pay gap between the sexes also point out the truth of job discrimination based on sex, since in the aggregate the average male makes more than the average female?

And if you're going to bring in time lost by women raising families, why is it women that mostly have to take the hit, unless it's also because of institutionalized and systemic discrimination, that a woman's career is regarded as less valuable than a man's?

And then there;s the whole "male privilege" thing.

A lot of the install CDs for games that run under Win9x come with various updates for redistributables, and as for the video drivers, on today's fast machines you don't need specialized optimized drivers.

Re: Florida Man

The guy has a serious infatuation with testicles - "There are four basic I.Q. testes; these testes test the four lobes of your brain."

Reminds me of the joke about the scotsman who was watching his first baseball game. He wanted to know why the batter didn't have to actually hit the ball when he was walked to the first base. "He's got 4 balls on him." "Walk with pride, mon! Walk with pride!"

You seem to be confuse. BSD allows you to sell the modified code without giving away the source. Sony uses it. Microsoft uses it. Apple uses it. Even linux uses bsd code.

Hint - Android does not run Java. Neither does an iPhone. So yes, phones work fine without Java.

Re: You confuse hating...

Hating on systemd OR logic based arguments? Why can't we have both? On second thought, scrolling through the comments, it seems we already have both.

Re: A Question of style

You should have taken a screen capture with the icons in place, inverted it, and offered to "install" it. Then flip the screen upside down (well, it WAS back in the days of CRTs). When they complain, tell them it's not your fault their computer isn't compatible. Then watch them try to click on an icon as the mouse goes in the opposite direction.

My first victim was the IT tyrant - you know, the guy who knows nothing, got the job because he knows the boss, and tries to dictate how everyone needs the same standard setup. Because that's all he knows.

15 minutes of saying that I infected his machine with a virus - with a crowd around him by then - when all he had to do was turn the monitor right side up and change the background.

I thought it was funny. So did everyone else who had experience with how he was a real PITA. What he thought was not on my list of TIGASA. And he couldn't complain because it would have shown just how incompetent he was.

For bonus points, my next victim I only rotated the image 90 degrees, then turned the monitor on its side.

Re: Don't be their 'rogue engineer'

Even cheaper and better option: Go down to city hall (or perhaps your bank) and have their notary public (aka public notary) witness, sign, date, and stamp the actual pages. In my town it's free if you're a resident $5 for non-residents, and you don't have to prove that the contents of the envelope haven't been tampered with.

Even better, the stamp is visible on photocopies. Kind of hard to claim the document was made long after the date stamped on it.

BTW - the whole "mail yourself a copy in an envelope" thing is old and flawed. People have been doing this for ages, thinking that it will protect patentable ideas, which is why it's called the "poor man's patent". It doesn't. More on this here http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-poor-mans-patent and here http://www.simplepatents.com/general-information/the-poor-mans-patent-is-a-myth/

As the IEEE Spectrum article points out, save yourself the cost of a stamp.

Re: Sad Times

Get a serious illness so you can't work for a year or two, whatcha gonna do? At least if you work as an employee, the company might be able to take you back, even if it's not the same position, because you have some knowledge of the business operations (what's called "corporate memory").

A contractor? You'll probably hear the same thing as pissed-off Hollywood producers say to talent - "You'll never work in this town again!" You can't recover from a 2-year hole.

Re: Important safety information:

And yet 6 point font is grounds for invalidating a contract under the consumer protection laws here, because it's too damn small for many people to read.

Re: Keep shuffling those deckchairs...

Actually, Microsoft has become VERY good at listening to their users. Even when the users don't want to be snooped on. Who do they think they are - Google or Facebook?

More to the point - the web is mostly crap nowadays. That's one reason why the people writing the crap are pushing bling on their web sites - hopefully you won't notice the crappiness. If instead of spending most of their time on the bling, and devoted it to content, they wouldn't *need* the bling.

Re: W10

Win81 has 2 reserved and 2 recovery partitions, and a system partition ... leaving just the primary partition. Turning off hibernation and deleting HYBER.SYS, turning off swap, etc., do not allow for the splitting of the primary partition. Your choices are limited to using an external drive or a complete wipe, or trying to use another OS to repartition the drive.