And if you're using vim (or any other editor that has scripting), you can shave off a lot more keystrokes. I have F2 bound to a script that inspects the current word and replaces it with a template if I've defined a matching one, or if it doesn't then replaces it with a begin / end block with that words as the argument. Things like itemize, description, enumerate, table, and figure all expand to a skeleton with a single keystroke.
This is because Word is designed with the same sorts of abstractions as something like LaTeX in mind. You are not supposed to edit styles unless you are the person creating the template for your organisation (and then you should be a developer, because you may need to integrate with various remote data sources, write wizards for selecting the correct subheadings for different document types, and so on). Normal users are meant to provide the content and select from predefined styles.
It's more a the degree to which all asians look the same is greater than the degree to which all students look like their student ID anecdote. Seriously, get a group of a dozen students and compare them to their student IDs and you'll probably find that half of them could pass for the other half. Unless you have something completely blatant (e.g. completely different skin colour), you're probably within the acceptable variation for the invigilators not to notice or care.
Doing nothing is an improvement over many third-party antivirus products. Remember the fun Norton bug last year, where they had a buffer overflow in their image parser that meant that someone sending you an email with an image attachment (even if you never opened the attachment) could run arbitrary code with kernel privilege? Quite why they thought that the part of their program that parses and inspects data that's expected to be malicious should run with kernel privilege instead of in a deprivileged sandbox was never revealed. I don't want to particularly pick on Norton here - most of the other vendors have had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that leave you worse off than if you didn't bother with their products at all.
Add to that, most antivirus products still use system-call interposition mechanisms that have been shown to be trivial to bypass for a decade (we used to set it as an exercise for undergrads).
Correct. Previously you were allowed 64-bit only, 32-bit only, and 32- or 64-bit universal. Now you are not allowed 32-bit only. That said, 64-bit does have some quite significant advantages for iOS, so I don't imagine Apple wanting to keep the 32-bit code around in the OS for longer than they have to. If you've got an iOS device with a 32-bit processor, your days of updates are probably numbered.
That sounds like a great idea, after you've tested that you can bring up a clone of your production system onto a spare [virtual] machine from the backups. If you don't do that first, then it sounds like an expensive way of discovering the bug that caused you to lose all of your customers' data.
I have. It's just as easy to accidentally click on the wrong folder, or delete the foo folder from the window showing bar instead of the window showing baz. This is why good UIs are all about making sure that there's an undo button that works after you've done the stupid thing, not about trying to make the stupid thing impossible. Most GUI systems will move things to the trash, rather than deleting. The problem is that users then get into the habit of reflexively emptying the trash immediately after a delete. You really want a filesystem design that adds blocks from deleted files to the end of a reuse list, so that new file allocation will overwrite the oldest deleted data by default and you can always undelete recently deleted things if you haven't written significant amounts of data in between the delete and the 'oh crap' moment.
And when your home directories are all mounted over NFS, your mv command copies a massive amount of data over the network, fills up the local disk and, if run as root, breaks the system by filling up the emergency part of the FS reserved for the root user. Good plan.
That's going to make rm very slow unless everything is on a single filesystem, which makes backups difficult. We tend to put each user's home directory in a separate ZFS filesystem and have a cron job creating and pruning snapshots. If a user accidentally deletes anything, the snapshots are all automounted in their ~/.zfs directory so that they can just copy the older version out themselves. On the main network, home directories are all on the NetApp filer that does this automatically (though using their own filesystem and putting snapshots in the ~/.snap directory)
Want to compete with Chromebooks? Offer something with a key differentiator. Provide the server part of the software as well as the client. A Chromebook is fine if you completely trust Google with all of your data, making something where you have to completely trust Microsoft with your data isn't really a selling point. A lot of companies would love to have something like a Chromebook (centrally managed updates, remote self destruct, network storage working out of the box) but where they kept the server part in house. Microsoft could easily offer this (and even Azure hosting for the server part if you decided you did trust Microsoft, but wanted a bit more control than a fully managed solution), but instead they keep trying to compete with Google on Google's own terms. I don't really miss the predatory monopolistic Microsoft, but it's a bit sad that the company now seems to be run by people who don't understand basic business.
There's another big difference between Office 365 University and Google's equivalent: Microsoft has a contract negotiation team. The privacy policy was unacceptable for us in both. Microsoft were willing to negotiate something that worked, Google weren't. We ended up getting the Office 365 thing. Unfortunately, our IT monkeys then set up the auth stupidly so that I have the same password for Office 365 as for payroll and confidential student records, so I can't actually use it without violating the data protection act until they sort that out. Which they said six months ago that they'd do soon... Fortunately, I didn't need to log in to download the offline version (they let us cache the installer image locally).
They're also paying for PowerPoint, which is one of the few bits of Office that's actually noticeably better than the '97 version (SmartArt makes it easy to add diagrams quickly and the newer UI on transitions is a big improvement) to the extent that I've stopped using Keynote for presentations.
An Office365 subscription lets you download the Windows, Mac, Android and iOS binaries for offline use, as well as providing access to the online versions. Outlook probably isn't much use if you don't have an Internet connection (or, some might argue, if you do), but the rest function just fine when you're disconnected.
Try pushing through a subsidy on second-hand electric vehicles (and it will need to be on second-hand ones if you want it to be competitive with dirt-cheap second-hand ICEs) and watch the automotive industry scream.
There's going to be a period when the TCO of an electrical vehicle is far less than an ICE, but the up-front cost is higher (especially as fuel duties rise). This is a real problem for inequality, because poorer people often don't have the option of accepting a higher up-front cost for a lower TCO. As more and more of the better-off people are buying electric vehicles, the resale value of ICEs will drop and this will make things worse.
It's difficult to tell the difference between putting your money where your mouth is and putting your mouth where your money is. If governments pass laws restricting fossil fuel use or taxing carbon emissions, then Gates' wealth increases. He may honestly believe that global warming is a huge threat to humanity, or he may simply be trying to see how much of the world's wealth he can control when he dies. If I were a skeptic, I'd be far more willing to believe the latter than the former, so he doesn't really help as a spokesman.
If someone comes to your town and tells you that there's a lot of evidence that next winter will be the coldest on record, will the fact that he owns 50% of the local double glazing and building insulation company make you more or less likely to believe him?
Not to mention that he has been buying up shares in green energy firms for years. It's generally better to find a spokesman for a cause that doesn't have a financial interest in it.
I don't remember people saying that he said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone' until the '90s, but in the '80s I remember him being quoted as saying '64KB ought to be enough for anyone'. The latter quote made more sense, because this was a hard-coded limitation in Microsoft BASIC and was integral to the design, whereas the 640KB limitation came from from Intel.
Credible death threats are illegal. A toddler telling someone else in kindergarten that they're going to kill them is a mean child who probably needs a teacher to explain a few things to them, but not actually a felon. If I tell you that I'm going to launch a nuclear ICBM at every city in the western hemisphere, just to make sure that I get you, then it's a comment in poor taste, but there's a pretty slim chance that I have access to that many nukes, so it's not a credible threat. If I post a photo of you walking to work and a caption saying that it's the last day that you'll make it alive, then I'd expect a visit from law enforcement agents with no sense of humour at all and to spend a lot of time trying to convince them and possibly a judge that I didn't really mean it.
I wish Big Finish would be a bit more realistic in their pricing. I just bought a couple of DVD boxed sets of 7-year runs of (fairly recent) TV shows for about £30-40 each. That's around 100 hours of big-budget film. If I buy the 8th Doctor / War Doctor series as a bundle from Big Finish, I get about 20 hours of audio for £100. A quick look on Amazon gives the first 4 seasons of the new Doctor Who (44 hours) for £38.99. Why on Earth does Big Finish think that their radio plays are worth £5/hour, when the TV show from which they are a spin-off is only 88p/hour? I've listened to a couple and enjoyed them, and I'd probably pay £20 for this collection and would definitely pay £10 for the download version without even thinking, but there's no way that I'd pay £100.
They're probably thinking that they need to keep the cost high to make up for the small volume, not realising that the high cost is the reason for the small volume.
This is still at 1 currently, but the press in Europe has spent the last couple of days pointing out that this is a violation of the Privacy Shield that was negotiated as replacement for the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, which was found to be invalid under EU law. If Privacy Shield is not in effect, then any EU company sharing data on EU citizens with a US company and any US company not compartmentalising its data on EU citizens into EU-registered subsidiaries may be liable for fines up to a few hundred million Euros.
There are dangers in being predictable and dangers in being unpredictable in terms of nuclear response. If you're too predictable, then Russia, China, or whoever can walk right up to the line, confident that you won't press the button unless they cross it. Annex the Crimea? Annex the whole of the Ukraine? What about Turkey, they're barely friends with NATO? Okay, what about Greece, they're pretty small - is it worth nuclear war for Greece? What about the Balkans? They mostly used to be part of the USSR anyway, and the opinion polls from Moscow show that there's overwhelming support. Eventually you realise that you've just ceded half of Europe to Russia or half os South-East Asia to China because they knew that your threshold for a nuclear response was the border of Germany, or Japan. The danger of being too unpredictable is that it gives an incentive for first strike: if there's a good chance someone is going to nuke you, you don't have much to lose by hitting them first.
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And if you're using vim (or any other editor that has scripting), you can shave off a lot more keystrokes. I have F2 bound to a script that inspects the current word and replaces it with a template if I've defined a matching one, or if it doesn't then replaces it with a begin / end block with that words as the argument. Things like itemize, description, enumerate, table, and figure all expand to a skeleton with a single keystroke.
This is because Word is designed with the same sorts of abstractions as something like LaTeX in mind. You are not supposed to edit styles unless you are the person creating the template for your organisation (and then you should be a developer, because you may need to integrate with various remote data sources, write wizards for selecting the correct subheadings for different document types, and so on). Normal users are meant to provide the content and select from predefined styles.
It's more a the degree to which all asians look the same is greater than the degree to which all students look like their student ID anecdote. Seriously, get a group of a dozen students and compare them to their student IDs and you'll probably find that half of them could pass for the other half. Unless you have something completely blatant (e.g. completely different skin colour), you're probably within the acceptable variation for the invigilators not to notice or care.
Doing nothing is an improvement over many third-party antivirus products. Remember the fun Norton bug last year, where they had a buffer overflow in their image parser that meant that someone sending you an email with an image attachment (even if you never opened the attachment) could run arbitrary code with kernel privilege? Quite why they thought that the part of their program that parses and inspects data that's expected to be malicious should run with kernel privilege instead of in a deprivileged sandbox was never revealed. I don't want to particularly pick on Norton here - most of the other vendors have had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that leave you worse off than if you didn't bother with their products at all.
Add to that, most antivirus products still use system-call interposition mechanisms that have been shown to be trivial to bypass for a decade (we used to set it as an exercise for undergrads).
Correct. Previously you were allowed 64-bit only, 32-bit only, and 32- or 64-bit universal. Now you are not allowed 32-bit only. That said, 64-bit does have some quite significant advantages for iOS, so I don't imagine Apple wanting to keep the 32-bit code around in the OS for longer than they have to. If you've got an iOS device with a 32-bit processor, your days of updates are probably numbered.
That sounds like a great idea, after you've tested that you can bring up a clone of your production system onto a spare [virtual] machine from the backups. If you don't do that first, then it sounds like an expensive way of discovering the bug that caused you to lose all of your customers' data.
Please mod the parent up. After the uptick in trolling and invective in the last couple of months, this post is a breath of fresh air around here.
I have. It's just as easy to accidentally click on the wrong folder, or delete the foo folder from the window showing bar instead of the window showing baz. This is why good UIs are all about making sure that there's an undo button that works after you've done the stupid thing, not about trying to make the stupid thing impossible. Most GUI systems will move things to the trash, rather than deleting. The problem is that users then get into the habit of reflexively emptying the trash immediately after a delete. You really want a filesystem design that adds blocks from deleted files to the end of a reuse list, so that new file allocation will overwrite the oldest deleted data by default and you can always undelete recently deleted things if you haven't written significant amounts of data in between the delete and the 'oh crap' moment.
And when your home directories are all mounted over NFS, your mv command copies a massive amount of data over the network, fills up the local disk and, if run as root, breaks the system by filling up the emergency part of the FS reserved for the root user. Good plan.
That's going to make rm very slow unless everything is on a single filesystem, which makes backups difficult. We tend to put each user's home directory in a separate ZFS filesystem and have a cron job creating and pruning snapshots. If a user accidentally deletes anything, the snapshots are all automounted in their ~/.zfs directory so that they can just copy the older version out themselves. On the main network, home directories are all on the NetApp filer that does this automatically (though using their own filesystem and putting snapshots in the ~/.snap directory)
But every hour I spend analysing my health data is an hour I can avoid exercising!
Want to compete with Chromebooks? Offer something with a key differentiator. Provide the server part of the software as well as the client. A Chromebook is fine if you completely trust Google with all of your data, making something where you have to completely trust Microsoft with your data isn't really a selling point. A lot of companies would love to have something like a Chromebook (centrally managed updates, remote self destruct, network storage working out of the box) but where they kept the server part in house. Microsoft could easily offer this (and even Azure hosting for the server part if you decided you did trust Microsoft, but wanted a bit more control than a fully managed solution), but instead they keep trying to compete with Google on Google's own terms. I don't really miss the predatory monopolistic Microsoft, but it's a bit sad that the company now seems to be run by people who don't understand basic business.
There's another big difference between Office 365 University and Google's equivalent: Microsoft has a contract negotiation team. The privacy policy was unacceptable for us in both. Microsoft were willing to negotiate something that worked, Google weren't. We ended up getting the Office 365 thing. Unfortunately, our IT monkeys then set up the auth stupidly so that I have the same password for Office 365 as for payroll and confidential student records, so I can't actually use it without violating the data protection act until they sort that out. Which they said six months ago that they'd do soon... Fortunately, I didn't need to log in to download the offline version (they let us cache the installer image locally).
They're also paying for PowerPoint, which is one of the few bits of Office that's actually noticeably better than the '97 version (SmartArt makes it easy to add diagrams quickly and the newer UI on transitions is a big improvement) to the extent that I've stopped using Keynote for presentations.
An Office365 subscription lets you download the Windows, Mac, Android and iOS binaries for offline use, as well as providing access to the online versions. Outlook probably isn't much use if you don't have an Internet connection (or, some might argue, if you do), but the rest function just fine when you're disconnected.
Try pushing through a subsidy on second-hand electric vehicles (and it will need to be on second-hand ones if you want it to be competitive with dirt-cheap second-hand ICEs) and watch the automotive industry scream.
There's going to be a period when the TCO of an electrical vehicle is far less than an ICE, but the up-front cost is higher (especially as fuel duties rise). This is a real problem for inequality, because poorer people often don't have the option of accepting a higher up-front cost for a lower TCO. As more and more of the better-off people are buying electric vehicles, the resale value of ICEs will drop and this will make things worse.
If someone comes to your town and tells you that there's a lot of evidence that next winter will be the coldest on record, will the fact that he owns 50% of the local double glazing and building insulation company make you more or less likely to believe him?
Not to mention that he has been buying up shares in green energy firms for years. It's generally better to find a spokesman for a cause that doesn't have a financial interest in it.
I don't remember people saying that he said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone' until the '90s, but in the '80s I remember him being quoted as saying '64KB ought to be enough for anyone'. The latter quote made more sense, because this was a hard-coded limitation in Microsoft BASIC and was integral to the design, whereas the 640KB limitation came from from Intel.
Let's compromise and ignore it until it enters the top 100 causes of death.
Credible death threats are illegal. A toddler telling someone else in kindergarten that they're going to kill them is a mean child who probably needs a teacher to explain a few things to them, but not actually a felon. If I tell you that I'm going to launch a nuclear ICBM at every city in the western hemisphere, just to make sure that I get you, then it's a comment in poor taste, but there's a pretty slim chance that I have access to that many nukes, so it's not a credible threat. If I post a photo of you walking to work and a caption saying that it's the last day that you'll make it alive, then I'd expect a visit from law enforcement agents with no sense of humour at all and to spend a lot of time trying to convince them and possibly a judge that I didn't really mean it.
I wish Big Finish would be a bit more realistic in their pricing. I just bought a couple of DVD boxed sets of 7-year runs of (fairly recent) TV shows for about £30-40 each. That's around 100 hours of big-budget film. If I buy the 8th Doctor / War Doctor series as a bundle from Big Finish, I get about 20 hours of audio for £100. A quick look on Amazon gives the first 4 seasons of the new Doctor Who (44 hours) for £38.99. Why on Earth does Big Finish think that their radio plays are worth £5/hour, when the TV show from which they are a spin-off is only 88p/hour? I've listened to a couple and enjoyed them, and I'd probably pay £20 for this collection and would definitely pay £10 for the download version without even thinking, but there's no way that I'd pay £100.
They're probably thinking that they need to keep the cost high to make up for the small volume, not realising that the high cost is the reason for the small volume.
This is still at 1 currently, but the press in Europe has spent the last couple of days pointing out that this is a violation of the Privacy Shield that was negotiated as replacement for the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles, which was found to be invalid under EU law. If Privacy Shield is not in effect, then any EU company sharing data on EU citizens with a US company and any US company not compartmentalising its data on EU citizens into EU-registered subsidiaries may be liable for fines up to a few hundred million Euros.
There are dangers in being predictable and dangers in being unpredictable in terms of nuclear response. If you're too predictable, then Russia, China, or whoever can walk right up to the line, confident that you won't press the button unless they cross it. Annex the Crimea? Annex the whole of the Ukraine? What about Turkey, they're barely friends with NATO? Okay, what about Greece, they're pretty small - is it worth nuclear war for Greece? What about the Balkans? They mostly used to be part of the USSR anyway, and the opinion polls from Moscow show that there's overwhelming support. Eventually you realise that you've just ceded half of Europe to Russia or half os South-East Asia to China because they knew that your threshold for a nuclear response was the border of Germany, or Japan. The danger of being too unpredictable is that it gives an incentive for first strike: if there's a good chance someone is going to nuke you, you don't have much to lose by hitting them first.