Everything that he does for the next four years is your responsibility.
If that seems unfair, welcome to why I hate modern politics and think it's all bollocks. Were the opposing candidates any different in this regard? No, they never are.
How much crap did any other president / prime minister promise and then never do? How's Guantanamo's promised removal coming along? 15 years later..
You can't hand people power without also taking the responsibility for doing so, same way I can't just hire a guy, give him all my jobs and - when he doesn't do them - go "Not my fault".
If you didn't vote for him, maybe there's some kind of reprieve there for you. But, well.. apparently it's tough.
If 51% of the population voted for men to be the ones who needed to give birth, and 49% didn't, is it democracy to then use that vote to force men to give birth instead of women, to initiate Brexit, vote in a president, or anything else? I'd argue not.
But, hey, either voted for him (suck it up) or you didn't (not your fault, and nothing you can fix now for four years). Enjoy your democracy. It sucks.
There was me thinking that actually "best person for the job" should be the criteria rather than "person that most people think is funny".
If you're writing enough to pagefiles, you need more RAM anyway.
If you're writing a lot to temporary areas, you need to stop doing so.
That said, I'm on an SSD machine at the moment that has been running for 6 months, with absolutely no special treatment, imaged from a years-old working PC without changing anything, and it's written 1.5TB. 1TB of that was the initial imaging process.
It's the main workhorse in an IT Office in a school, use for 10+ hours every single day for everything imaginable. Client machines rarely use much.
It has a write-life of 100TB. If it dies, I just hit F12 and re-image cleanly.
At current usage (not including the initial image), I count that as 1TB of write a year, which gives longer the expected lifetime of the PC itself, however far out I am.
There's no need for special treatment, no need to use special SSD transfer software, no need to over-provision, or increase RAM cache or anything else. Just have a PC that isn't slogging itself to death, and slap an SSD in.
Don't expect it to last forever, but you shouldn't need to adjust ANYTHING at all.
And I've done this on all the staff work machines earlier this year - zero failures so far and it has made much more of a performance difference than doubling the amount of RAM. In fact, where machines had motherboards that were limited in RAM, we SSD'd and saw HUGE performance increases better than those clients whose RAM we doubled but are running on traditional hard disks.
At home I have a 1TB EVO 850 and that's the same. Literally imaged byte-for-byte, and is stupendously fast and no need for any software changes whatsoever, and the write numbers are predicting 20+ years of life despite a similar 10+ hours a day of usage.
Don't RELY on it never failing. But they are going to be in warranty (whether that's by number of years, or data written) for the life of your machine, under even heavy usage, unless you're doing something incredibly stupid (like use in NVR, RAID, or similar without buying a high-write-endurance model).
But then it's also assuming an omnidirectional, fairly constant stream of particles which, when obstructed, has a cone of effect in its outer direction. The "shadow" if you will.
Your hypothesis, with an omnidirectional field, would mean that - at a certain distance from the object casting the shadow - there would be enough affect at virtually-the-same-angles from all the other parts of the wind to make any distance gravity effect infinitesimally small in comparison.
But gravity is constant with distance.
To use an analogy, if you don't follow me, if you hide behind a companion in a hailstorm, their path will shelter you somewhat (and, in your theory, that would "pull" you towards them). But if they're half-a-mile down the road, your theory says that it would be like the hailstorm - you'll be pelted from all directions no matter what they do.
I think, by now, it's conclusive that gravity acts the same indeterminate of distance. Or galaxies wouldn't be flying around each other.
It just makes me question the uniqueness being measured (we know fingerprints are "unique" enough for convictions, but if your nose passes muster to a fingerprint reader as a valid fingerprint, surely it's not measuring that much uniqueness in the first place?). Noses just don't have unique, large, raised, patterning like fingerprints do. You can SEE and FEEL fingerprints, that's how large the features are. You can't see much difference between one squished nose and another.
All this tells me is that fingerprint readers on smartphones are naff toys. And I don't for a second buy the "it depends on the glove used" tripe either.
I looked into a fingerprint reader that schools were using for access. It turns out to be a scanner. With some Linux tools and jiggery-pokery you can pull out a black-and-white scanned TIFF from the sensor, which just feeds it into software which does the "uniqueness" bit (finding edges and comparing corner points, mostly).
So I printed out the TIFF, swiped that, and it accepted it. I'm sure they've come on leaps and bounds since, but they are still susecptible to the same old attacks. You don't need to find "a finger that's correct", just a sufficiently convincing model of that finger. That can be anything from a flat piece of paper, to a PCB-etched one, to some gummi bears moulded from that. But still, outside of humongously expensive things, nothing really that good at detecting fakes.
The heartbeat sensor in my phone uses the colour of the skin to measure heartrate "accurately enough". It's literally just a colour sensor, like a scanner, with sufficient red illumination to make your pulse "visible". That could easily form another part of a smartphone fingerprint sensor. And would STILL be just as susceptible to, say, a smartphone display showing the fingerprint and red-pulse that it expects.
It's the analogue hole all over again. If you can copy the data stream sufficiently, you don't need the original any more.
The answer to which - as in all unproven things - is "We just don't know".
It's unlikely, as gaps for anti-gravity devices don't exist in any of our mathematics currently, but until you prove what gravity is, guessing at whether anti-gravity is possible is basically moot.
But doesn't really explain why a large obstruction that has little mass would less of an effect than a tiny obstruction with huge mass (e.g. singularities, ultra-dense stars, etc.).
Are you saying that the density of the object doesn't matter? Or are you saying that a large object somehow "sucks in" the wind in areas surrounding it but not directly touching? Which is basically taking you back to curvature of space-time again, albeit with a complication layer in between.
I don't use keyloggers, but a lot of the "monitoring" software has that feature. Does that count as "we bought keyloggers"? Apparently so.
And I can think of uses for them. Until you work in a rough school (e.g. where 16-year-old kids will throw a PC through a third-floor window because "why am I sitting GCSE computing, I'm gonna be a mechanic anyway, my dad said so", and then start a fight INSIDE AN EXAM ROOM to get out of it etc.), you have no idea of the shit that flies around. Even things like working on shared documents with other pupils, typing in THE WORST kind of threats ("will rape u", etc. to girls), insults and bullying and then deleting it before the teacher sees it.
The usual use of them is in fact to detect grooming keywords, where younger pupils are typing in their personal details in chatrooms that they find that aren't blocked, and so on. It's for discovery, not 24/7 monitoring. When the keylogger sees things like A/S/L? they will flag it for review.
Personally, I refuse them, but I have software with that capability. And I now work in the nicest school you can imagine (private primary school) with kids who are disciplined for failing to hold open a door for a member of staff.
And nobody ever protests to the point that it doesn't happen.
My current school even get around the "having to edit photographs for those children whose parents didn't consent" stuff - the school agreements basically says that by sending them to the school, you agree we can use their photo for school purposes. We still can't IDENTIFY the child (child protection again), but we don't have to sit and blank out faces from a photo of an assembly with 500+ kids.
That's why I blocked fingerprint payments in the canteen. That's why I blocked ID cards and access cards for the kids. That's why I blocked use of their photographs on their accounts. That's why I block anything that hints of 1984.
But THE LAW says I need to protect them from people finding out that same information. And that means their SCHOOL device, used FOR SCHOOL, bought BY THE SCHOOL, needs to be managed by THE SCHOOL. Amazing that. It says NOTHING about what the parents do with the child at home.
(P.S. I removed my daughter from a nursery because they demanded fingerprints to allow parents access to the building...)
The beauty and art in the book 1984 was not that a draconian society was formed. It's that it was a natural evolution of what happens when someone imagines that level of technology.
Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere, no government is that highly organised and no school is part of a secret plot to brainwash your children (at least, not without getting caught - we don't even have that Creationism junk in schools over here because it's illegal to teach that rubbish!).
It is THE LAW that we must ensure that the children's devices do not expose them and are managed and under school control. Hence we install monitoring software.
We are required, by child protection laws, by e-safety regulations, by basic child management, and by parental demand, to watch what they are doing and intercept what we can.
And, from experience, even when we do, kids will load up porn sites (Filters? We have multiple layers. Kids are good at getting round them) and try to print them out before the IT guys can stop it, kids will watch movie trailers not suitable for their age, kids will try to get on their home email or some third-party message service so they can chat across the classrooms (exposing themselves to the possibility of strangers contacting them, which is the first stage of grooming).
Bitch about it all you want, the law says we have to protect them in this way and any school that doesn't will fail inspection, be outed by parents and be on the news by lunchtime when a child just walks past their management, filters or settings.
And in the days of BYOD and 1:1 devices, that means we also install settings, management profiles and enforce proxy/filter settings on device that they might well take home. Generally, parents will DEMAND that. Or else they are just being given a computer that - at home - lets their little darlings walk past their NetNanny or equivalent.
And it's parents demanding the devices in the first place. Certainly not the school IT departments!
Before you leap on the privacy shite, consider the background. Schools have ZERO choice in this. Failing to implement such measures means they will be taken to court. Not providing devices or BYOD means they are made to feel like the dinosaurs of education and parents run away from them. In some cases, such devices are basically DEMANDED.
Feel like that leaves you between a rock and a hard place? Welcome to my life.
I've worked in UK schools all my life as the IT guy. State, private, primary, secondary and above. We have no choice. Even data protection means we need to secure, manage and lock down the children's machines so that their data doesn't leak to third-parties (like browser extensions and shite like other front-page stories at the moment) - because THAT'S breaking the law as well, unless they have an EU-compatible Data Protection policy.
Before you assume evil on behalf on the schools, imagine the alternative - schools without tech competing with schools with tech, or schools with no e-Safety of child protection on their machines.
We teach our pupils to treat the school iPad like an exercise book. Use it for work. Configure it for your work. Don't play games on it. Don't doodle on it. Only use it in lessons when your teacher asks you to. Take it home and do your homework on it if you like/need to. But spying on the kids via it? No. Because it should be used for school work only. Worried about the school IT guy looking at what your child searches for? You have bigger problems, such as what they are doing to your child in school, with access to their school email, web history, etc. And if you're that worried, turn the device off when at home.
But don't come out guns blazing thinking that child privacy is the biggest issue at play here. It's not. It's important - ESPECIALLY important. But the other things that it dictates (i.e. others not seeing that information that the school already can get a myriad of ways) are infinitely more important.
Data Protection Act attracts huge fines and is very clear about what is personal data, what you can do with it (nothing without explicit permission), and who's responsible if they don't.
When they are fining HOSPITALS hundreds of thousands of pounds for failing to protect even the most basic data, Facebook would have been on the receiving end of millions of pounds worth of fines almost instantly.
Yet again, EU and UK data protection law is well-worded and will bite you in the arse. Something the US doesn't seem to understand.
I have dozens of games on GOG. And a thousand on Steam.
I'm not saying there's anything other than market-barriers to doing so, but that's historically proven to be a pipe-dream for anything other than your own products (Witcher, etc.) or old ones that nobody cares about any more because they aren't going to be pirated by the people who want them (most of the GOG catalogue).
Company that breaks the law a lot and whose prime product is a not-very-rare substance made rare purely by their own greediness tries to cope with people making identical, but not at all rare, products that are functionally identical.
Why they haven't been sued into oblivion for monopolistic practices, I can't fathom. Why I should ever buy a "real" diamond over one made - in this day and age - when both are heavily crafted to become a tiny, tiny, expensive final product, I can't fathom. Literally, no-one would *wear* a rough diamond. So they have to be cut anyway. At that point, you're really then arguing about the difference between two products - both made in the same way from a bunch of ore that comes from difference techniques (I'm sure we really care whether the gold in a gold ring was dug up in some mine, or melted down from someone else's misfortune, don't we?).
Never understood it. Never get why they aren't up before a court. And don't buy that shit on moral, and financial, grounds.
What would enlighten the human race to shit like this? If we had armageddon, would we REALLY trade in gold watches and diamonds, or - as I think - would we be much more likely to fight over oil and practical products (maybe even working computers)?
Well, how IS the 1990's? Because that's the last time you could reasonably work that way.
And I have to say, much as I dislike the concept, Steam has been flawless for 13+ years for me and I don't buy games any other way any more.
I do claim my games on all platforms (e.g. GOG Connect, Origin etc.) when they allow or I have extra keys from bundles, just to spread them out and give me a game if Steam should ever be down. But I have 1000+ games on Steam and I can't see me stopping absent serious problems.
By comparison, I've never even looked in the Windows Store, I just disable it on all machines (work ones that I manage, and personal) and all my Games For Windows Live games have been retired or stopped working properly. Same for GameSpy and others.
I realise the limitation and I'd love every game to be DRM-free but it's just not practical in this day and age. Steam is the best compromise there is, and it shows.
But the last time a disc touched my PC? Years ago. They're all sitting upstairs and I *re-bought* most of the games I was keeping the discs for on online downloads (like Steam or GOG) just for the convenience factor. I'm probably never going to put those boxed games anywhere ever again and a lot of them are hard to get working nowadays anyway.
So your sentiment is so misguided. Sure, ideally, it would work like that. But it doesn't. That's the simple fact of the matter. And you're 13 years too late to change that. Kids these days don't even understand the concept of a machine that's not on the Internet, programs that don't just download and install at the touch of a button, or things like serial keys. They literally were born AFTER that stuff was dead.
And good luck buying a laptop with a CD drive nowadays, or one with an OS that lets your old games run without you having to do anything.
Those phones you list do NOTHING. Literally lost in the noise. That's why at least two of them are considering pulling out of the market altogether and selling rival / generic products instead.
Samsung outsell Apple 5-1. It's just because Apple devices are so CHEAP SHITE sold at premium prices that they make enormous profit. In unit terms, Apple are in second place after Samsung, and the rest barely figure at all.
I manage IT and deal with every kind of BYOD for schools - including parents, kids and staff. Nobody I know has a HTC of Blackberry. NOBODY. Not had one brought to me in literally years.
Which pretty much matches smartphone sales percentages where they are concerned.
But the 100+% thing is still bollocks. You've just made up how it's reported. If sales over a particular period at looked at, you can't cheat like that, and even if you do those sales count towards "total sales". So any hyped up bollocks about making more than 100% of the profits over that period is shitty accounting or bollocks hyping.
Given that it's Apple, I'll take the latter.
P.S. losses don't count as anti-profits in that regard either, if you're going to say "what percentage of the profits".
The method of notification has to be done with the agreement of Parliament. That's what UK law has ALWAYS said. This court just confirm it.
What this means is that a PM can't just stand up and say "Wahey, I'm now immune to all laws and everyone must give me all their sweeties". It's not legal to do so. To do that, you have to go through processes to make it legal, which involves getting Parliament to agree to a law that makes the PM explicitly immune.
Nobody's saying "you can't do what you want to do", they are saying "you can't do it THAT way". That way was "royal prerogative" - the power of the Crown which was given to parliament to enable it to operate as if it owned the country.
That prerogative DOES NOT APPLY in this case, without the approval of Parliament. Which would be the way you'd do this if you DIDN'T have the royal prerogative anyway (i.e. like every other country in the world).
What this is saying is not "Brexit can't happen". It's saying "By the laws we have, now, today, you need Parliament's approval to actually activate this". The will of the power is, apparently, Brexit. But Parliament are the ones who need to convert that will to laws and actions, and thus they need to approve of the methods to do that, rather than being overruled by one woman in a suit who just thought she could ignore or break the laws written before her.
It's like the President saying he gets to shag all the virgins in the country and there's nothing you can do about it. Nobody has that kind of ultimate power any more because their power is given to them by law, and that law itself dictates how those laws can be changed. You can change the law to make that legal, if the law allows you to, and it will almost certainly require approval by whatever governmental representatives approve such things. And if that law changed, it would be legal to do that.
But you can't just stand up and do anything you like.
That kind of rule went out in the Dark Ages in civilised countries because it just creates tyrants and dictatorships.
The Queen, the Prime Minister, the President, and other such people are some of the people who have much less power than people realise. They are bound by LAWS WRITTEN BY THEIR PREDECESSORS whether they like it or not, and changing those laws needs other laws to be followed to be lawful.
And a country that can just ignore laws it finds inconvenient without any kind of comeback is not a country anyone will do business with, enter into agreements with, or want to live in. Effectiveness of enforcement of those laws is another matter entirely, but if you want to Brexit and it's illegal to just say "Let's Brexit", you are paid representatives who are there to convert the will of the people to actions to enable Brexit so you will need to find another way. Which is easy. There's lots of them. The easiest is parliamentary approval, like EVERY OTHER LAW requires.
This is nothing more than a dotting-the-I, crossing-the-T method to ensure that Brexit, when it happens, isn't on shaky legal ground so that the rest of the EU can't say "Actually, that's illegal, you can't do that, so - no, you haven't given us legal notice of you leaving" halfway through the process.
That's why it's a court judgement, not a politician or Parliament judgement. It's not legal. Change the law to make it legal and you can do it. Guess what changing the law requires? Parliamentary approval.
Opera browser was ad-supported but also pay-for to remove them before - what? - 3.5?
It was removed because it just discouraged users and made only a pittance. In fact, the browser went free and then produced its best and most popular versions. Oh, and they had Opera Turbo which is basically the same VPN thing for all that time.
It's only when the development team was sacked many years later that they threw the browser away, made a similar-looking (but severely lacking) Chrome-clone, and then wondered why everyone disappeared and made old-Opera-clones that they feel the need to ad-support it again in an era where "ads" = things to annoy users with because who cares about them, so long as we get 1/1000th of a penny?
Glad to see that I made the right decision to not continue with Opera past version 12.
UK Data Protection laws would prevent the disclosure of a British domain name owner's data to a non-EU law process, yes.
But a valid UK court's request for the same would be accepted.
Why haven't they tried to compel a UK court to agree to disclose that information for the purposes of law enforcement?
If they have, and they've been denied, I'd be very interested in the reasoning because there's not much reason to refuse if it's got to the stage of a cross-border copyright infringement. So I'd guess that they haven't tried, or tried hard enough.
If a sysadmin can't do things they consider simple, and won't USE THE COMPUTER even as a client, how many old grannies out there are struggling just the same but plod along without trying to do *whatever* again because they couldn't work it out.
Seriously, I've seen users who can't do multiple apps without closing others first, who can't minimise, maximise or use dual-screens. And Macs have things that are much more unintuitive on them too.
I'm not saying "Argh, nobody can possibly use them". I'm saying, you can make up all the nonsense you like, fact is they are not inherently easier to use for anyone - at any skill level.
Windows 8 had an office of people baffled when we tried to close a Metro app from a touchscreen without using the mouse. We literally couldn't find it, it was so unintuitive (we weren't swiping from THE VERY TOP of the screen, you see). But claiming - or even inferring - that Mac is so wonderful that those things never happen? It means you've never watched a user use one of those things for the first time, or sat with them purely helping only when they get stuck.
There's a difference between "free" and "costs nothing".
My time costs nothing. I don't need to pay anyone. I can take my time and do it my way, at my own convenience and stop when I like.
However, forking out $500 extra is not something I can necessarily do at any point.
But, to be honest, you're assuming that a) they're an existing Mac user, b) they can't cope on Ubuntu and c) things are easier to learn on Mac than on Ubuntu.
Not all of those are going to be true. And when they're not, the time factor is common to both machines, or specific to your particular workload.
For instance, after 20 years in the industry, I still feel a productivity drop the second I hit a Mac workstation. I literally feel held back on what I want to achieve. When it works, sure, it's fine like anything else. But when it doesn't, it's a damn nightmare and finding service and support is not cheap if you don't like the answer "We'll just reinstall". And I'm not just talking Mac desktops but Mac "servers" as well (P.S. a bog-standard Mac with a software upgrade from the App Store isn't a "server").
Take, for instance, when I needed to renew a certificate. On one Mac Mini server we were using, I clicked Renew, it said it was successful, done. On another, identical, purchased at the same time, same spec, redundant Mac Mini performing the same functions, the Renew failed. Two hours later, after basically using a terminal and what amounted to OpenSSL commands, I got it to renew without breaking the certificate chain. UI options to do that after failure? ZERO. And guess where the Renew button is, go on... I dare you. It changes between OS versions and is tucked away in an obscure place half the time.
Sure, it's not every day, but that's the instances I use them. And in the every day stuff, I avoid them precisely because of stuff like this. We have suites of Macs... the users avoid them and can get into all kinds of trouble especially where keychains or App Store apps are involved. Simple fixes but "only if you know how".
Macs are nice WHILE THEY WORK and you use them to do simple things. The time and effort when they don't is multiplied enormously compared to competitors. I can google and in five seconds find an Ubuntu page for basically anything I want to do. With Macs, I can spend hours searching forums (central knowledgebase is bog-useless, a bit like MS KB, but at least most general PC forums can help you on a Windows PC) and end up at the answer "You can't" or "Nobody knows."
Yes, I manage them. I manage hundreds of iPads and dozens of Macs, and some servers. And they consume more time than hundreds of Chromebooks, hundreds of PCs and dozens of Windows servers. Over my lifetime I've managed hundreds of them, thousands of iPads and thousand and thousands of other machines. And I still choose not to use them whenever possible because of the time-suck that finding out how to do something simple can be.
Think of it this way: The Mac is more expensive and makes some functions easier. The Ubuntu is cheaper, and takes more legwork. Windows is the middle ground, not cheap but not simple either.
However, when things go wrong, that flips completely on its head.
P.S. I had a 2-week argument with Apple only recently because we can't create iTunes accounts for a school. Doesn't matter what they get me to sign up to, etc. they have no support for it, the systems they have in place (including Apple School Manager which is still in Beta over here), etc. does not provide me with the simplest of functionality to lock down an iPad, even with £100k of Cisco Meraki MDM kit. Their ultimate solution was to relax a security restriction so I could manually create iTunes accounts so that kids with iPads could sign in and use them. That's their solution for A SCHOOL with hundreds of these things.
When things go wrong, or outside of their intended use-case, Apple honestly could not care less. I'd rather not pay for that attitude, and avoid having to d
So when we replace notoriously dangerous, low-paying and skilled jobs with robots that can only kill themselves and nobody else, we then need to crow about how many jobs have been lost?
It's like the UK miner's strikes all over again. We can't sell the shit once we pull it out of the ground without lowering costs (which means lower wages for those people or more dangerous working conditions for the unscrupulous), but we have to preserve those jobs artificially so people have something to do during the day?
No.
Mining is prime candidate for automation. Long, repetitive, boring, dangerous conditions couple together really badly. especially where any kind of manual labour is involved too.
But when we automate it, the overtone is "Oh, no, we're losing jobs?"
If owner we could convince Whatsapp owner to stop pushing two god-damn-awful separate apps for Facebook and Messenger, neither of which are as useful as just Request Desktop Site in your mobile Chrome browser.
Seriously, Facebook is THE most uninstalled app on all the smartphones I've ever help people with. It consume space at ludicrous rates and yet does nothing better than a browser would, and every time you want to message, you have to load up an entirely different app anyway (presumably because the bloat would make it even bigger).
Noise isn't a problem. It's unpredictable noise or unwanted noise that's a problem. Or noise that cannot be controlled.
In IT, working in a deathly silent office is bugging. I need the background of fans spinning to "feel right", but I don't think it needs to be loud, or even immediately audible. And anything beeping will drive me to distraction as my brain is tuned to find that beeping thing and fix whatever the problem is.
But a tap dripping? Or headphones tizzing? Or someone tapping their foot or banging a door? Even a mouse clicking? That drives me mad. That's why the background hum is good - it washes them all out.
I work in an office with a technician. He's young, keen, not used to workplaces with lots of other young people.
We have a "swear jar" of sorts. It's for when he hums, whistles or breaks into song. Playing music, I've told him, is right out. Like others, I've worked in places with fed-in music and it drives me insane. I spent a year in an IT office with a badly-tuned radio locked to BBC Radio 1 and it drove me mad.
I work in schools, so some weeks/months of the year there is nobody around. All my speaker-sets go missing as the office and teaching staff use them to take advantage of the empty offices by having their music up louder than they'd ever be allowed while others are around.
Run an after-school event and all the kids want to plug themselves in while they work. I'm sure that's good for them but the noise leakage from their tiny in-ear things is immensely annoying and often means it's banned even through headphones (not just by me). Even on the school PC's, no apps, games or anything else that makes a sound and internal speakers are switched off - when you have 20 PCs in a room, that's just a cacophony of nightmares.
It's a matter of courtesy. Even if you NEED sound to concentrate, you need to understand that others NEED silence. If you can find a way to have your sound without interfering with their silence, they won't have a problem with you. But blanking out sound is immensely harder than drowning out silence. and there's a fascination with having music so loud that everyone can hear, even out of sound-insulating headphones. That's just unnecessary and rude.
And when you get into singing along, humming, drumming, tapping or anything else, I will break your fingers and shove them down your oesophagus. That's not necessary at all and does nothing but inflict your sounds on others that have already chosen not to listen to your music.
I own a couple of sets of headphones. At a reasonable price, set to a reasonable volume, you literally can't hear a thing from outside them. And I couldn't hear a thing outside when wearing them. So it's not impossible to cater for such tastes. But people don't do it. The problem is that there's no earplug or set of headphones that can provide silence in such a situation. The closest you get is bassy tinnitus coupled with heartbeat, blood-rush, swim-ear sounds, with the background slightly muted in the background.
So when you're on your own, out of earshot, do what you like. When there are others around who don't like sound you need to get a decent set of headphones and keep it to yourself. I know that means restraint in your personal tastes, but you also have to stop picking your nose, scratching your feet, farting, undressing, and all the other distasteful habits at that point too.
I will make one exception: With babies around, you should not be asked to be silent for them to sleep. All you're doing is breeding people like me who can't relax in silence by doing that. And a baby will sleep through ANYTHING. Babies will fall asleep outside in a noisy shopping centre, at a party, with a movie blaring, etc. *Sudden* noise might wake them but that's only more sudden and scary against the silent background than if you just all talked normally over the sleeping child and someone sneezed or whatever.
And if a baby wakes, it wakes. Nobody INTENDS to wake them. That's m
So if you use a copy of Microsoft Office that you didn't pay for but got from "a guy", you can't have civil action against you?
I think you'll find that's not how copyright works, has ever worked or will ever work.
Because at that point, it's not really *copy*right you have to worry about, it's licensing for the original work. To copy it would have been infringement, and you're using an unlicensed copy whether you were the one to copy it or not.
The problem is exactly that judges spent too long reading the law, because that's what's enforced and convicts you, not the dictionary definition unless there is absolutely no legal definition anywhere that's been previously established by a court of law or a legal statute.
We're talking about when people say, in a meeting, "Well, can you justify that?" or "Why do we have to do that?" where the simple answer isn't enough and you're explicitly asked for more. And then I provide simple and complex answers simultaneously, but often at a later date (because opposite me is a pseudo-expert I respect who disagrees and his boss who knows nothing and won't understand the full thing).
At that point of asking, "normal" (non-autistic-trait) people switch off and rarely care as they've formed their opinion already, it's in opposition to yours (or they wouldn't question your reasoning), and they're asking for justification enough to change their mind. And then they don't look at it, or they do the "Oh, well, that's beyond me, I didn't read it all"... and then go on to make the decision the same way anyway because - presumably - it would make them feel foolish to be seen as taking advice, and they'd rather actually be PROVEN wrong further down the line when it's too late to backtrack.
Agreed that, by default, I provide the reasoning and answer, because it's just that often that the answer isn't enough or leads to a demand for the reasoning anyway. By the time it's got to an email chain, Yes or No won't be good enough.
But people believe that the "minutes" from a meeting are all that matters, not why those decisions were made or who made them, which is why I get things explicitly minuted in some meetings so I can go back later and, effectively, do an "I told you so". Without that explicit demand, it gets claimed that all the reasoning behind the decision was unimportant even when that reasoning is shown correct (i.e. we shouldn't have done X because Y would happen, we do X and - shock - Y happens).
And it's not even as simple as just avoiding blame / liability, or covering up, or failing to admit a weakness.
As you point out - if you trust the expert opinion you're asking for, you don't need the full explanation. I certainly have done this to those below me - "You're sure? You know how to do that? And it will solve the problem? Cool, I'll leave it with you.".
And I will happily provide Yes/No but that *is* opinion, because when it differs from theirs I'm ALWAYS asked for an explanation. In fact, being asked for my reasoning is the prime hint that I'm about to be overruled anyway.
There are many times where my boss has needed to spend upwards of £100k on my opinion. A Yes/No has sufficed, because they don't understand but they can see that it's a no-brainer to myself, even if it's hard to justify to a layman. It does happen. But when opinions differ and reasoning is required, it's ignored or needs to be so dumbed down as to be unconvincing and useless.
The second you involve other departments, staff, layers of management, etc. everything turns from Yes/No into "justify that", and then the justification ignored for a pre-made decision, and even swept under the carpet so it can't come back to bite them later. Often, you don't even find out their reasoning for overruling, which is the EXACT thing they asked you for. Even "Oh, we can't afford that much!" - that's a valid reason. When you're not prepared to give that it makes me question motives.
I've worked in several places where THE MOST ILLOGICAL decisions are made almost every day. There's literally no rhyme or reason and all those carrying out those decisions cannot see the logic behind it, even if they assume bad-actors, monetary gain, power-grabbing or whatever else as the reasoning.
As the person I am, I combat association with those types of decision by providing - on request - my reasoning. To use your code-analogy, I am "open-source". Not only do I tell you what I'm doing, I tell you why, and what else has been tried, and why that failed or isn't suitable, and why we should do things exactly THIS way.
And then, effectively, someone else buys their brother-in-law's piece of junky proprietary software and
Slashdot Mirror
You voted for him.
Everything that he does for the next four years is your responsibility.
If that seems unfair, welcome to why I hate modern politics and think it's all bollocks. Were the opposing candidates any different in this regard? No, they never are.
How much crap did any other president / prime minister promise and then never do? How's Guantanamo's promised removal coming along? 15 years later..
You can't hand people power without also taking the responsibility for doing so, same way I can't just hire a guy, give him all my jobs and - when he doesn't do them - go "Not my fault".
If you didn't vote for him, maybe there's some kind of reprieve there for you. But, well.. apparently it's tough.
If 51% of the population voted for men to be the ones who needed to give birth, and 49% didn't, is it democracy to then use that vote to force men to give birth instead of women, to initiate Brexit, vote in a president, or anything else? I'd argue not.
But, hey, either voted for him (suck it up) or you didn't (not your fault, and nothing you can fix now for four years). Enjoy your democracy. It sucks.
There was me thinking that actually "best person for the job" should be the criteria rather than "person that most people think is funny".
If you're writing enough to pagefiles, you need more RAM anyway.
If you're writing a lot to temporary areas, you need to stop doing so.
That said, I'm on an SSD machine at the moment that has been running for 6 months, with absolutely no special treatment, imaged from a years-old working PC without changing anything, and it's written 1.5TB. 1TB of that was the initial imaging process.
It's the main workhorse in an IT Office in a school, use for 10+ hours every single day for everything imaginable. Client machines rarely use much.
It has a write-life of 100TB. If it dies, I just hit F12 and re-image cleanly.
At current usage (not including the initial image), I count that as 1TB of write a year, which gives longer the expected lifetime of the PC itself, however far out I am.
There's no need for special treatment, no need to use special SSD transfer software, no need to over-provision, or increase RAM cache or anything else. Just have a PC that isn't slogging itself to death, and slap an SSD in.
Don't expect it to last forever, but you shouldn't need to adjust ANYTHING at all.
And I've done this on all the staff work machines earlier this year - zero failures so far and it has made much more of a performance difference than doubling the amount of RAM. In fact, where machines had motherboards that were limited in RAM, we SSD'd and saw HUGE performance increases better than those clients whose RAM we doubled but are running on traditional hard disks.
At home I have a 1TB EVO 850 and that's the same. Literally imaged byte-for-byte, and is stupendously fast and no need for any software changes whatsoever, and the write numbers are predicting 20+ years of life despite a similar 10+ hours a day of usage.
Don't RELY on it never failing. But they are going to be in warranty (whether that's by number of years, or data written) for the life of your machine, under even heavy usage, unless you're doing something incredibly stupid (like use in NVR, RAID, or similar without buying a high-write-endurance model).
But then it's also assuming an omnidirectional, fairly constant stream of particles which, when obstructed, has a cone of effect in its outer direction. The "shadow" if you will.
Your hypothesis, with an omnidirectional field, would mean that - at a certain distance from the object casting the shadow - there would be enough affect at virtually-the-same-angles from all the other parts of the wind to make any distance gravity effect infinitesimally small in comparison.
But gravity is constant with distance.
To use an analogy, if you don't follow me, if you hide behind a companion in a hailstorm, their path will shelter you somewhat (and, in your theory, that would "pull" you towards them). But if they're half-a-mile down the road, your theory says that it would be like the hailstorm - you'll be pelted from all directions no matter what they do.
I think, by now, it's conclusive that gravity acts the same indeterminate of distance. Or galaxies wouldn't be flying around each other.
It just makes me question the uniqueness being measured (we know fingerprints are "unique" enough for convictions, but if your nose passes muster to a fingerprint reader as a valid fingerprint, surely it's not measuring that much uniqueness in the first place?). Noses just don't have unique, large, raised, patterning like fingerprints do. You can SEE and FEEL fingerprints, that's how large the features are. You can't see much difference between one squished nose and another.
All this tells me is that fingerprint readers on smartphones are naff toys. And I don't for a second buy the "it depends on the glove used" tripe either.
I looked into a fingerprint reader that schools were using for access. It turns out to be a scanner. With some Linux tools and jiggery-pokery you can pull out a black-and-white scanned TIFF from the sensor, which just feeds it into software which does the "uniqueness" bit (finding edges and comparing corner points, mostly).
So I printed out the TIFF, swiped that, and it accepted it. I'm sure they've come on leaps and bounds since, but they are still susecptible to the same old attacks. You don't need to find "a finger that's correct", just a sufficiently convincing model of that finger. That can be anything from a flat piece of paper, to a PCB-etched one, to some gummi bears moulded from that. But still, outside of humongously expensive things, nothing really that good at detecting fakes.
The heartbeat sensor in my phone uses the colour of the skin to measure heartrate "accurately enough". It's literally just a colour sensor, like a scanner, with sufficient red illumination to make your pulse "visible". That could easily form another part of a smartphone fingerprint sensor. And would STILL be just as susceptible to, say, a smartphone display showing the fingerprint and red-pulse that it expects.
It's the analogue hole all over again. If you can copy the data stream sufficiently, you don't need the original any more.
And that just makes fingerprints worthless.
The answer to which - as in all unproven things - is "We just don't know".
It's unlikely, as gaps for anti-gravity devices don't exist in any of our mathematics currently, but until you prove what gravity is, guessing at whether anti-gravity is possible is basically moot.
It's like asking if there might be an anti-ghost.
But doesn't really explain why a large obstruction that has little mass would less of an effect than a tiny obstruction with huge mass (e.g. singularities, ultra-dense stars, etc.).
Are you saying that the density of the object doesn't matter? Or are you saying that a large object somehow "sucks in" the wind in areas surrounding it but not directly touching? Which is basically taking you back to curvature of space-time again, albeit with a complication layer in between.
I don't use keyloggers, but a lot of the "monitoring" software has that feature. Does that count as "we bought keyloggers"? Apparently so.
And I can think of uses for them. Until you work in a rough school (e.g. where 16-year-old kids will throw a PC through a third-floor window because "why am I sitting GCSE computing, I'm gonna be a mechanic anyway, my dad said so", and then start a fight INSIDE AN EXAM ROOM to get out of it etc.), you have no idea of the shit that flies around. Even things like working on shared documents with other pupils, typing in THE WORST kind of threats ("will rape u", etc. to girls), insults and bullying and then deleting it before the teacher sees it.
The usual use of them is in fact to detect grooming keywords, where younger pupils are typing in their personal details in chatrooms that they find that aren't blocked, and so on. It's for discovery, not 24/7 monitoring. When the keylogger sees things like A/S/L? they will flag it for review.
Personally, I refuse them, but I have software with that capability. And I now work in the nicest school you can imagine (private primary school) with kids who are disciplined for failing to hold open a door for a member of staff.
Correct.
And nobody ever protests to the point that it doesn't happen.
My current school even get around the "having to edit photographs for those children whose parents didn't consent" stuff - the school agreements basically says that by sending them to the school, you agree we can use their photo for school purposes. We still can't IDENTIFY the child (child protection again), but we don't have to sit and blank out faces from a photo of an assembly with 500+ kids.
Yeah, that's my ultimate plan.
That's why I blocked fingerprint payments in the canteen.
That's why I blocked ID cards and access cards for the kids.
That's why I blocked use of their photographs on their accounts.
That's why I block anything that hints of 1984.
But THE LAW says I need to protect them from people finding out that same information. And that means their SCHOOL device, used FOR SCHOOL, bought BY THE SCHOOL, needs to be managed by THE SCHOOL. Amazing that. It says NOTHING about what the parents do with the child at home.
(P.S. I removed my daughter from a nursery because they demanded fingerprints to allow parents access to the building...)
The beauty and art in the book 1984 was not that a draconian society was formed. It's that it was a natural evolution of what happens when someone imagines that level of technology.
Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere, no government is that highly organised and no school is part of a secret plot to brainwash your children (at least, not without getting caught - we don't even have that Creationism junk in schools over here because it's illegal to teach that rubbish!).
Sigh.
I work in schools, in the UK.
It is THE LAW that we must ensure that the children's devices do not expose them and are managed and under school control. Hence we install monitoring software.
We are required, by child protection laws, by e-safety regulations, by basic child management, and by parental demand, to watch what they are doing and intercept what we can.
And, from experience, even when we do, kids will load up porn sites (Filters? We have multiple layers. Kids are good at getting round them) and try to print them out before the IT guys can stop it, kids will watch movie trailers not suitable for their age, kids will try to get on their home email or some third-party message service so they can chat across the classrooms (exposing themselves to the possibility of strangers contacting them, which is the first stage of grooming).
Bitch about it all you want, the law says we have to protect them in this way and any school that doesn't will fail inspection, be outed by parents and be on the news by lunchtime when a child just walks past their management, filters or settings.
And in the days of BYOD and 1:1 devices, that means we also install settings, management profiles and enforce proxy/filter settings on device that they might well take home. Generally, parents will DEMAND that. Or else they are just being given a computer that - at home - lets their little darlings walk past their NetNanny or equivalent.
And it's parents demanding the devices in the first place. Certainly not the school IT departments!
Before you leap on the privacy shite, consider the background. Schools have ZERO choice in this. Failing to implement such measures means they will be taken to court. Not providing devices or BYOD means they are made to feel like the dinosaurs of education and parents run away from them. In some cases, such devices are basically DEMANDED.
Feel like that leaves you between a rock and a hard place? Welcome to my life.
I've worked in UK schools all my life as the IT guy. State, private, primary, secondary and above. We have no choice. Even data protection means we need to secure, manage and lock down the children's machines so that their data doesn't leak to third-parties (like browser extensions and shite like other front-page stories at the moment) - because THAT'S breaking the law as well, unless they have an EU-compatible Data Protection policy.
Before you assume evil on behalf on the schools, imagine the alternative - schools without tech competing with schools with tech, or schools with no e-Safety of child protection on their machines.
We teach our pupils to treat the school iPad like an exercise book. Use it for work. Configure it for your work. Don't play games on it. Don't doodle on it. Only use it in lessons when your teacher asks you to. Take it home and do your homework on it if you like/need to. But spying on the kids via it? No. Because it should be used for school work only. Worried about the school IT guy looking at what your child searches for? You have bigger problems, such as what they are doing to your child in school, with access to their school email, web history, etc. And if you're that worried, turn the device off when at home.
But don't come out guns blazing thinking that child privacy is the biggest issue at play here. It's not. It's important - ESPECIALLY important. But the other things that it dictates (i.e. others not seeing that information that the school already can get a myriad of ways) are infinitely more important.
"For whatever reason"
It's called breaking the fucking law otherwise.
Data Protection Act attracts huge fines and is very clear about what is personal data, what you can do with it (nothing without explicit permission), and who's responsible if they don't.
When they are fining HOSPITALS hundreds of thousands of pounds for failing to protect even the most basic data, Facebook would have been on the receiving end of millions of pounds worth of fines almost instantly.
Yet again, EU and UK data protection law is well-worded and will bite you in the arse. Something the US doesn't seem to understand.
And half the games on there are pre-1995.
I have dozens of games on GOG. And a thousand on Steam.
I'm not saying there's anything other than market-barriers to doing so, but that's historically proven to be a pipe-dream for anything other than your own products (Witcher, etc.) or old ones that nobody cares about any more because they aren't going to be pirated by the people who want them (most of the GOG catalogue).
Company that breaks the law a lot and whose prime product is a not-very-rare substance made rare purely by their own greediness tries to cope with people making identical, but not at all rare, products that are functionally identical.
Why they haven't been sued into oblivion for monopolistic practices, I can't fathom. Why I should ever buy a "real" diamond over one made - in this day and age - when both are heavily crafted to become a tiny, tiny, expensive final product, I can't fathom. Literally, no-one would *wear* a rough diamond. So they have to be cut anyway. At that point, you're really then arguing about the difference between two products - both made in the same way from a bunch of ore that comes from difference techniques (I'm sure we really care whether the gold in a gold ring was dug up in some mine, or melted down from someone else's misfortune, don't we?).
Never understood it. Never get why they aren't up before a court. And don't buy that shit on moral, and financial, grounds.
What would enlighten the human race to shit like this? If we had armageddon, would we REALLY trade in gold watches and diamonds, or - as I think - would we be much more likely to fight over oil and practical products (maybe even working computers)?
Well, how IS the 1990's? Because that's the last time you could reasonably work that way.
And I have to say, much as I dislike the concept, Steam has been flawless for 13+ years for me and I don't buy games any other way any more.
I do claim my games on all platforms (e.g. GOG Connect, Origin etc.) when they allow or I have extra keys from bundles, just to spread them out and give me a game if Steam should ever be down. But I have 1000+ games on Steam and I can't see me stopping absent serious problems.
By comparison, I've never even looked in the Windows Store, I just disable it on all machines (work ones that I manage, and personal) and all my Games For Windows Live games have been retired or stopped working properly. Same for GameSpy and others.
I realise the limitation and I'd love every game to be DRM-free but it's just not practical in this day and age. Steam is the best compromise there is, and it shows.
But the last time a disc touched my PC? Years ago. They're all sitting upstairs and I *re-bought* most of the games I was keeping the discs for on online downloads (like Steam or GOG) just for the convenience factor. I'm probably never going to put those boxed games anywhere ever again and a lot of them are hard to get working nowadays anyway.
So your sentiment is so misguided. Sure, ideally, it would work like that. But it doesn't. That's the simple fact of the matter. And you're 13 years too late to change that. Kids these days don't even understand the concept of a machine that's not on the Internet, programs that don't just download and install at the touch of a button, or things like serial keys. They literally were born AFTER that stuff was dead.
And good luck buying a laptop with a CD drive nowadays, or one with an OS that lets your old games run without you having to do anything.
Do you have any idea about the current market?
Those phones you list do NOTHING. Literally lost in the noise. That's why at least two of them are considering pulling out of the market altogether and selling rival / generic products instead.
Samsung outsell Apple 5-1. It's just because Apple devices are so CHEAP SHITE sold at premium prices that they make enormous profit. In unit terms, Apple are in second place after Samsung, and the rest barely figure at all.
I manage IT and deal with every kind of BYOD for schools - including parents, kids and staff. Nobody I know has a HTC of Blackberry. NOBODY. Not had one brought to me in literally years.
Which pretty much matches smartphone sales percentages where they are concerned.
But the 100+% thing is still bollocks. You've just made up how it's reported. If sales over a particular period at looked at, you can't cheat like that, and even if you do those sales count towards "total sales". So any hyped up bollocks about making more than 100% of the profits over that period is shitty accounting or bollocks hyping.
Given that it's Apple, I'll take the latter.
P.S. losses don't count as anti-profits in that regard either, if you're going to say "what percentage of the profits".
It's not nullified.
The method of notification has to be done with the agreement of Parliament. That's what UK law has ALWAYS said. This court just confirm it.
What this means is that a PM can't just stand up and say "Wahey, I'm now immune to all laws and everyone must give me all their sweeties". It's not legal to do so. To do that, you have to go through processes to make it legal, which involves getting Parliament to agree to a law that makes the PM explicitly immune.
Nobody's saying "you can't do what you want to do", they are saying "you can't do it THAT way". That way was "royal prerogative" - the power of the Crown which was given to parliament to enable it to operate as if it owned the country.
That prerogative DOES NOT APPLY in this case, without the approval of Parliament. Which would be the way you'd do this if you DIDN'T have the royal prerogative anyway (i.e. like every other country in the world).
What this is saying is not "Brexit can't happen". It's saying "By the laws we have, now, today, you need Parliament's approval to actually activate this". The will of the power is, apparently, Brexit. But Parliament are the ones who need to convert that will to laws and actions, and thus they need to approve of the methods to do that, rather than being overruled by one woman in a suit who just thought she could ignore or break the laws written before her.
It's like the President saying he gets to shag all the virgins in the country and there's nothing you can do about it. Nobody has that kind of ultimate power any more because their power is given to them by law, and that law itself dictates how those laws can be changed. You can change the law to make that legal, if the law allows you to, and it will almost certainly require approval by whatever governmental representatives approve such things. And if that law changed, it would be legal to do that.
But you can't just stand up and do anything you like.
That kind of rule went out in the Dark Ages in civilised countries because it just creates tyrants and dictatorships.
The Queen, the Prime Minister, the President, and other such people are some of the people who have much less power than people realise. They are bound by LAWS WRITTEN BY THEIR PREDECESSORS whether they like it or not, and changing those laws needs other laws to be followed to be lawful.
And a country that can just ignore laws it finds inconvenient without any kind of comeback is not a country anyone will do business with, enter into agreements with, or want to live in. Effectiveness of enforcement of those laws is another matter entirely, but if you want to Brexit and it's illegal to just say "Let's Brexit", you are paid representatives who are there to convert the will of the people to actions to enable Brexit so you will need to find another way. Which is easy. There's lots of them. The easiest is parliamentary approval, like EVERY OTHER LAW requires.
This is nothing more than a dotting-the-I, crossing-the-T method to ensure that Brexit, when it happens, isn't on shaky legal ground so that the rest of the EU can't say "Actually, that's illegal, you can't do that, so - no, you haven't given us legal notice of you leaving" halfway through the process.
That's why it's a court judgement, not a politician or Parliament judgement. It's not legal. Change the law to make it legal and you can do it. Guess what changing the law requires? Parliamentary approval.
Opera browser was ad-supported but also pay-for to remove them before - what? - 3.5?
It was removed because it just discouraged users and made only a pittance. In fact, the browser went free and then produced its best and most popular versions. Oh, and they had Opera Turbo which is basically the same VPN thing for all that time.
It's only when the development team was sacked many years later that they threw the browser away, made a similar-looking (but severely lacking) Chrome-clone, and then wondered why everyone disappeared and made old-Opera-clones that they feel the need to ad-support it again in an era where "ads" = things to annoy users with because who cares about them, so long as we get 1/1000th of a penny?
Glad to see that I made the right decision to not continue with Opera past version 12.
UK Data Protection laws would prevent the disclosure of a British domain name owner's data to a non-EU law process, yes.
But a valid UK court's request for the same would be accepted.
Why haven't they tried to compel a UK court to agree to disclose that information for the purposes of law enforcement?
If they have, and they've been denied, I'd be very interested in the reasoning because there's not much reason to refuse if it's got to the stage of a cross-border copyright infringement. So I'd guess that they haven't tried, or tried hard enough.
You're missing the point.
If a sysadmin can't do things they consider simple, and won't USE THE COMPUTER even as a client, how many old grannies out there are struggling just the same but plod along without trying to do *whatever* again because they couldn't work it out.
Seriously, I've seen users who can't do multiple apps without closing others first, who can't minimise, maximise or use dual-screens. And Macs have things that are much more unintuitive on them too.
I'm not saying "Argh, nobody can possibly use them". I'm saying, you can make up all the nonsense you like, fact is they are not inherently easier to use for anyone - at any skill level.
Windows 8 had an office of people baffled when we tried to close a Metro app from a touchscreen without using the mouse. We literally couldn't find it, it was so unintuitive (we weren't swiping from THE VERY TOP of the screen, you see). But claiming - or even inferring - that Mac is so wonderful that those things never happen? It means you've never watched a user use one of those things for the first time, or sat with them purely helping only when they get stuck.
There's a difference between "free" and "costs nothing".
My time costs nothing. I don't need to pay anyone. I can take my time and do it my way, at my own convenience and stop when I like.
However, forking out $500 extra is not something I can necessarily do at any point.
But, to be honest, you're assuming that a) they're an existing Mac user, b) they can't cope on Ubuntu and c) things are easier to learn on Mac than on Ubuntu.
Not all of those are going to be true. And when they're not, the time factor is common to both machines, or specific to your particular workload.
For instance, after 20 years in the industry, I still feel a productivity drop the second I hit a Mac workstation. I literally feel held back on what I want to achieve. When it works, sure, it's fine like anything else. But when it doesn't, it's a damn nightmare and finding service and support is not cheap if you don't like the answer "We'll just reinstall". And I'm not just talking Mac desktops but Mac "servers" as well (P.S. a bog-standard Mac with a software upgrade from the App Store isn't a "server").
Take, for instance, when I needed to renew a certificate. On one Mac Mini server we were using, I clicked Renew, it said it was successful, done. On another, identical, purchased at the same time, same spec, redundant Mac Mini performing the same functions, the Renew failed. Two hours later, after basically using a terminal and what amounted to OpenSSL commands, I got it to renew without breaking the certificate chain. UI options to do that after failure? ZERO. And guess where the Renew button is, go on... I dare you. It changes between OS versions and is tucked away in an obscure place half the time.
Sure, it's not every day, but that's the instances I use them. And in the every day stuff, I avoid them precisely because of stuff like this. We have suites of Macs... the users avoid them and can get into all kinds of trouble especially where keychains or App Store apps are involved. Simple fixes but "only if you know how".
Macs are nice WHILE THEY WORK and you use them to do simple things. The time and effort when they don't is multiplied enormously compared to competitors. I can google and in five seconds find an Ubuntu page for basically anything I want to do. With Macs, I can spend hours searching forums (central knowledgebase is bog-useless, a bit like MS KB, but at least most general PC forums can help you on a Windows PC) and end up at the answer "You can't" or "Nobody knows."
Yes, I manage them. I manage hundreds of iPads and dozens of Macs, and some servers. And they consume more time than hundreds of Chromebooks, hundreds of PCs and dozens of Windows servers. Over my lifetime I've managed hundreds of them, thousands of iPads and thousand and thousands of other machines. And I still choose not to use them whenever possible because of the time-suck that finding out how to do something simple can be.
Think of it this way: The Mac is more expensive and makes some functions easier. The Ubuntu is cheaper, and takes more legwork. Windows is the middle ground, not cheap but not simple either.
However, when things go wrong, that flips completely on its head.
P.S. I had a 2-week argument with Apple only recently because we can't create iTunes accounts for a school. Doesn't matter what they get me to sign up to, etc. they have no support for it, the systems they have in place (including Apple School Manager which is still in Beta over here), etc. does not provide me with the simplest of functionality to lock down an iPad, even with £100k of Cisco Meraki MDM kit. Their ultimate solution was to relax a security restriction so I could manually create iTunes accounts so that kids with iPads could sign in and use them. That's their solution for A SCHOOL with hundreds of these things.
When things go wrong, or outside of their intended use-case, Apple honestly could not care less. I'd rather not pay for that attitude, and avoid having to d
So when we replace notoriously dangerous, low-paying and skilled jobs with robots that can only kill themselves and nobody else, we then need to crow about how many jobs have been lost?
It's like the UK miner's strikes all over again. We can't sell the shit once we pull it out of the ground without lowering costs (which means lower wages for those people or more dangerous working conditions for the unscrupulous), but we have to preserve those jobs artificially so people have something to do during the day?
No.
Mining is prime candidate for automation. Long, repetitive, boring, dangerous conditions couple together really badly. especially where any kind of manual labour is involved too.
But when we automate it, the overtone is "Oh, no, we're losing jobs?"
If owner we could convince Whatsapp owner to stop pushing two god-damn-awful separate apps for Facebook and Messenger, neither of which are as useful as just Request Desktop Site in your mobile Chrome browser.
Seriously, Facebook is THE most uninstalled app on all the smartphones I've ever help people with. It consume space at ludicrous rates and yet does nothing better than a browser would, and every time you want to message, you have to load up an entirely different app anyway (presumably because the bloat would make it even bigger).
Noise isn't a problem. It's unpredictable noise or unwanted noise that's a problem. Or noise that cannot be controlled.
In IT, working in a deathly silent office is bugging. I need the background of fans spinning to "feel right", but I don't think it needs to be loud, or even immediately audible. And anything beeping will drive me to distraction as my brain is tuned to find that beeping thing and fix whatever the problem is.
But a tap dripping? Or headphones tizzing? Or someone tapping their foot or banging a door? Even a mouse clicking? That drives me mad. That's why the background hum is good - it washes them all out.
I work in an office with a technician. He's young, keen, not used to workplaces with lots of other young people.
We have a "swear jar" of sorts. It's for when he hums, whistles or breaks into song. Playing music, I've told him, is right out. Like others, I've worked in places with fed-in music and it drives me insane. I spent a year in an IT office with a badly-tuned radio locked to BBC Radio 1 and it drove me mad.
I work in schools, so some weeks/months of the year there is nobody around. All my speaker-sets go missing as the office and teaching staff use them to take advantage of the empty offices by having their music up louder than they'd ever be allowed while others are around.
Run an after-school event and all the kids want to plug themselves in while they work. I'm sure that's good for them but the noise leakage from their tiny in-ear things is immensely annoying and often means it's banned even through headphones (not just by me). Even on the school PC's, no apps, games or anything else that makes a sound and internal speakers are switched off - when you have 20 PCs in a room, that's just a cacophony of nightmares.
It's a matter of courtesy. Even if you NEED sound to concentrate, you need to understand that others NEED silence. If you can find a way to have your sound without interfering with their silence, they won't have a problem with you. But blanking out sound is immensely harder than drowning out silence. and there's a fascination with having music so loud that everyone can hear, even out of sound-insulating headphones. That's just unnecessary and rude.
And when you get into singing along, humming, drumming, tapping or anything else, I will break your fingers and shove them down your oesophagus. That's not necessary at all and does nothing but inflict your sounds on others that have already chosen not to listen to your music.
I own a couple of sets of headphones. At a reasonable price, set to a reasonable volume, you literally can't hear a thing from outside them. And I couldn't hear a thing outside when wearing them. So it's not impossible to cater for such tastes. But people don't do it. The problem is that there's no earplug or set of headphones that can provide silence in such a situation. The closest you get is bassy tinnitus coupled with heartbeat, blood-rush, swim-ear sounds, with the background slightly muted in the background.
So when you're on your own, out of earshot, do what you like. When there are others around who don't like sound you need to get a decent set of headphones and keep it to yourself. I know that means restraint in your personal tastes, but you also have to stop picking your nose, scratching your feet, farting, undressing, and all the other distasteful habits at that point too.
I will make one exception: With babies around, you should not be asked to be silent for them to sleep. All you're doing is breeding people like me who can't relax in silence by doing that. And a baby will sleep through ANYTHING. Babies will fall asleep outside in a noisy shopping centre, at a party, with a movie blaring, etc. *Sudden* noise might wake them but that's only more sudden and scary against the silent background than if you just all talked normally over the sleeping child and someone sneezed or whatever.
And if a baby wakes, it wakes. Nobody INTENDS to wake them. That's m
So if you use a copy of Microsoft Office that you didn't pay for but got from "a guy", you can't have civil action against you?
I think you'll find that's not how copyright works, has ever worked or will ever work.
Because at that point, it's not really *copy*right you have to worry about, it's licensing for the original work. To copy it would have been infringement, and you're using an unlicensed copy whether you were the one to copy it or not.
The problem is exactly that judges spent too long reading the law, because that's what's enforced and convicts you, not the dictionary definition unless there is absolutely no legal definition anywhere that's been previously established by a court of law or a legal statute.
We're not talking about every single answer.
We're talking about when people say, in a meeting, "Well, can you justify that?" or "Why do we have to do that?" where the simple answer isn't enough and you're explicitly asked for more. And then I provide simple and complex answers simultaneously, but often at a later date (because opposite me is a pseudo-expert I respect who disagrees and his boss who knows nothing and won't understand the full thing).
At that point of asking, "normal" (non-autistic-trait) people switch off and rarely care as they've formed their opinion already, it's in opposition to yours (or they wouldn't question your reasoning), and they're asking for justification enough to change their mind. And then they don't look at it, or they do the "Oh, well, that's beyond me, I didn't read it all"... and then go on to make the decision the same way anyway because - presumably - it would make them feel foolish to be seen as taking advice, and they'd rather actually be PROVEN wrong further down the line when it's too late to backtrack.
Agreed that, by default, I provide the reasoning and answer, because it's just that often that the answer isn't enough or leads to a demand for the reasoning anyway. By the time it's got to an email chain, Yes or No won't be good enough.
But people believe that the "minutes" from a meeting are all that matters, not why those decisions were made or who made them, which is why I get things explicitly minuted in some meetings so I can go back later and, effectively, do an "I told you so". Without that explicit demand, it gets claimed that all the reasoning behind the decision was unimportant even when that reasoning is shown correct (i.e. we shouldn't have done X because Y would happen, we do X and - shock - Y happens).
And it's not even as simple as just avoiding blame / liability, or covering up, or failing to admit a weakness.
As you point out - if you trust the expert opinion you're asking for, you don't need the full explanation. I certainly have done this to those below me - "You're sure? You know how to do that? And it will solve the problem? Cool, I'll leave it with you.".
And I will happily provide Yes/No but that *is* opinion, because when it differs from theirs I'm ALWAYS asked for an explanation. In fact, being asked for my reasoning is the prime hint that I'm about to be overruled anyway.
There are many times where my boss has needed to spend upwards of £100k on my opinion. A Yes/No has sufficed, because they don't understand but they can see that it's a no-brainer to myself, even if it's hard to justify to a layman. It does happen. But when opinions differ and reasoning is required, it's ignored or needs to be so dumbed down as to be unconvincing and useless.
The second you involve other departments, staff, layers of management, etc. everything turns from Yes/No into "justify that", and then the justification ignored for a pre-made decision, and even swept under the carpet so it can't come back to bite them later. Often, you don't even find out their reasoning for overruling, which is the EXACT thing they asked you for. Even "Oh, we can't afford that much!" - that's a valid reason. When you're not prepared to give that it makes me question motives.
I've worked in several places where THE MOST ILLOGICAL decisions are made almost every day. There's literally no rhyme or reason and all those carrying out those decisions cannot see the logic behind it, even if they assume bad-actors, monetary gain, power-grabbing or whatever else as the reasoning.
As the person I am, I combat association with those types of decision by providing - on request - my reasoning. To use your code-analogy, I am "open-source". Not only do I tell you what I'm doing, I tell you why, and what else has been tried, and why that failed or isn't suitable, and why we should do things exactly THIS way.
And then, effectively, someone else buys their brother-in-law's piece of junky proprietary software and