"‘It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me out,’ said Zaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. 'Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you’ve done it.’"
Depends on when it was actually developed, and how it was released. If it wasn't even developed yet or was still restricted to the lab, then no. And even if it existed but wasn't part of a mainstream distribution and still required extraction from a Beta release of some product, it still casts doubt that it would have been used by those who put forth the document. Most people aren't going to go through the effort to get new fonts like that.
Correct. Only time I was contacted when on medical leave was when someone screwed up the configs on some rather important core equipment and was looking for a backup. Referred them to another coworker who apparently was able to help 'em out.
When I'm on vacation I turn off the work email alerts. It's never been a problem.
It's almost like it was meant to inspect corporate or government computers where lazy IT admins might not have migrated 64-bit-capable workstations to 64-bit OSes because they've been maintaining a 32-bit OS/image for years, and to then allow that information to be inspected to determine which computers to attempt to infect with other payloads.
And depending on the profession that you pursue that might leave you at a significant disadvantage to your peers.
I take care of equipment where I need to be notified as to the state of that equipment. There's a hundred sites involved, 700 closets plus probably another 1500 smaller devices. Having a device that does wireless e-mail is the fastest and easiest way for me to be notified of outages and service restorations.
I've used TNPP and TAP in the past for this kind of notification, but TNPP suffers from being numeric-only and TAP and SMS suffer from character limit. All suffer from needing a gateway to turn the message into something that a dumb phone can receive.
The point is that having more current information that others can mean out-competing others. The ability to communicate that information is important. Not all professions work that way, but for those that do, quick information and communications is vital.
Google has been around for a long time now. I bitched at [Google] for years: Why the fuck can't we type in a question and get a decent answer? There's all sorts of pre-processing you can do with the computing we have now to put a lot more semantics in there, and look at the shit you're retrieving.
Because Google already gets into trouble when it prefers its own services or when it editorializes. Alan Kay should note that when one asks Google for what are essentially undisputed facts one often gets Google-formatted answers. Search for famous persons and one usually get the page formatted with an excerpt from their biography, date of birth, place of birth or upbringing, some basic information on what brought the person to prominence, etc. Generally these things are not disputed, so there's no real risk in presenting them in this fashion.
Now, if Google starts answering controversial questions, even correctly, they may face some real backlash that they wish to avoid from people that can't accept the answer. It's even worse if there is some legitimate dispute in a discussion, and appearing to side with one answer or another when something isn't settled can influence the discussion in ways that are not appropriate.
If you want straight answers, look at Wolfram Alpha.
US labor laws are often first-line enforced by state-level boards of labor, and there are large gaps in federal law that not all states make up. A friend of mine was having issues with an employer not allowing breaks, but it turns out that breaks are not federally mandated, nor are they mandated by this particular state either. We ended up having to take a different tack (turns out the boss had two businesses would avoid paying employees time-and-a-half overtime by switching which company they worked for during the week, this got them slammed with a requirement to pay all that OT plus some heavy fines from the state) but there's no guarantee that states will do their job to enforce workplace protections or to mandate them in the first place. Given what Wisconsin has been up to lately I would be surprised if they did enforce them adequately.
Yep. The computer merely makes counting ballots in a well-run election faster. It makes the paper the authoritative documentation, with the computer merely a tabulation device so that many fewer people can actually run the election to bring costs down.
Don't use the computer to take the voter input and then generate a paper receipt, use the paper ballot with on-site optical scan to record the result that the voter marked on the paper. If you want to get 1980s-fancy, implement an on-ballot print technique that puts one pattern of ink dot next to each entry that the voter filled-out correctly, and possibly another next to those that the voter did not fill-out correctly (like those pick 3 entries for county commissioners etc, or where the voter left the field empty) in case later manual review is necessary. Could even go so far as to generate serial numbers on the now-scanned-and-printed ballots, where those ballots that had issues have their serial numbers noted for manual review if necessary (ie, at a minimum if the voting is too close to call for some particular initiatives) and for that serial number to be machine-readable in the future (ie, also helps the computer know the ballot is already scanned, so that it doesn't tally multiple times if scanned multiple times). We had this technology with optical-scan "scantron" forms for school tests from at least the 1980s, if not the 1970s, so this should not be a hard thing to do.
If an election goes well then board of elections can perform a small audit, looking at perhaps a few polling places to confirm that the paper matches the electronic, and then perhaps a random sampling of ballots at other polling places, and then pat itself on the back. If an election goes spectacularly badly, the board of elections can hand-tally each and every paper ballot if necessary, because they were human-readable when marked by a voter. The ballots, not the computer, is the official result of the election. The computer merely helps speed-up the process of counting the results.
And probably a plugin that lets me fake my browser's info to sites that ask.
Did that for FF 31 for a very long time, didn't really ever have functionality problems either. IMHO this current versioning system is complete and utter garbage as it no longer has any meaning. Used to be that the ones-digit meant a milestone. Tenths decimal was a major revision, possibly with additonal features,but the look-and-feel remained largely the same and the user experience was similar enough that training documentation was generally valid. Hundredths decimal was minor, minor tweaks only, usually bugfixes.
most of what I see coming out of FF now is hundredths-decimal changes. Sometimes it's tenths. I'm not even sure when it's ones/units anymore. Maybe FF 57 would count. In short though, I don't really care anymore and I only use FF because I used Netscape and then Mozilla and then FF, so if FF gets too dissimilar to what I'm used to or too similar to other offerings then I probably have no reason to bother keeping with it anymore.
Yeah, I saw the writing on the wall with the color scheme shift that XP had. It reminded me of one of those keyboards for young children, and it did not seem to serve much of a purpose besides to make what had been a fairly slim UI (sizes of buttons, menus, spacing between elements) and increase it and make it child-friendly.
Unfortunately subsequent to the early 2000s it seems like a lot of people are trying their hands at UI design and they don't have the first clue how to do it because they're so used to high resolution, physically large displays that they don't get how to be minimalist in their approaches. That doesn't mean I expect people to design for an 800x600 screen anymore, but is it too much to ask for designers to not have horizontal scroll bars on my 1920x1200 display?
Mmmhmm. I don't remember what feature it was exactly, but some computer management dialog box was basically swapped between 2K and XP, a feature that admins apparently used constantly. The dialog box had all of the same stuff as before, simply reordered. Drove people nuts because it didn't seem to have been done for any purpose other than to give a reason for the version number to increment.
...UI designers are replaced with graphics designers.
One of the reasons why Windows 95 was so successful in the corporate workplace was the icon set and look-and-feel. Remember, at that time there were still competitive offerings like OS/2 and UNIX X-windows with CDE, and even Apple's MacOS. Windows 95 took some faux-3d experiments from Windows 3.1/3.11 and ran whole-hog with them to the point that it was almost weird when a legacy application still used flat icons or 2d windows.
Microsoft has regressed with its UI so severely that it's embarassing. They're basically back to 2d icons and a program-manager interface, and from my view it's change solely for the sake of change, not because it actually improved anything. Worse since they've fragmented into pre-metro and metro elements, there are essentially two control panels to take care of the OS where neither method contains access to all of the settings and where there's no clear division of functions between the two.
Service kept dropping out. Didn't have to pay for my modem anyway since we have the home telephone line, so they supplied the model with the VOIP capability.
COX just broke DOCSIS below 3.0, had to change modems.
I'd really wanted to use a DOCSIS HWIC module for my Cisco router, but COX specifically said that module would not be supported on their network, and then with the 3.0+ requirement, the 2.1-capable unit isn't supported anyway.
Really wish that Google Fiber hadn't stalled. Theres a dark fiber trunk line running through the neighborhood around 200' from my house, and Google was in the habit of buying dark fiber wherever they could.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess no one else found this funny but I chuckled.
Orc-slaying knife. It has a +5 against Orcs.
"‘It’s the wild colour scheme that freaks me out,’ said Zaphod, whose love affair with the ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. 'Every time you try and operate these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up in black to let you know you’ve done it.’"
No.
Have you seen the way people drive in only two dimensions?
When the Magic 8-ball told me "Outlook not so good" I believed it. I still do.
Watermark in the font? Like a character that's unique to the font so that it's clear that it's the font in-use?
Depends on when it was actually developed, and how it was released. If it wasn't even developed yet or was still restricted to the lab, then no. And even if it existed but wasn't part of a mainstream distribution and still required extraction from a Beta release of some product, it still casts doubt that it would have been used by those who put forth the document. Most people aren't going to go through the effort to get new fonts like that.
Correct. Only time I was contacted when on medical leave was when someone screwed up the configs on some rather important core equipment and was looking for a backup. Referred them to another coworker who apparently was able to help 'em out.
When I'm on vacation I turn off the work email alerts. It's never been a problem.
Sure. CCleaner version 5.34. Available from downloads.ru today!
It's almost like it was meant to inspect corporate or government computers where lazy IT admins might not have migrated 64-bit-capable workstations to 64-bit OSes because they've been maintaining a 32-bit OS/image for years, and to then allow that information to be inspected to determine which computers to attempt to infect with other payloads.
And depending on the profession that you pursue that might leave you at a significant disadvantage to your peers.
I take care of equipment where I need to be notified as to the state of that equipment. There's a hundred sites involved, 700 closets plus probably another 1500 smaller devices. Having a device that does wireless e-mail is the fastest and easiest way for me to be notified of outages and service restorations.
I've used TNPP and TAP in the past for this kind of notification, but TNPP suffers from being numeric-only and TAP and SMS suffer from character limit. All suffer from needing a gateway to turn the message into something that a dumb phone can receive.
The point is that having more current information that others can mean out-competing others. The ability to communicate that information is important. Not all professions work that way, but for those that do, quick information and communications is vital.
If you want straight answers, look at Wolfram Alpha.
I don't accept this answer. We have https://www.wolframalpha.com/ [wolframalpha.com]
I don't understand your answer. Are you a bot from either Google or from Wolfram Alpha?
Google has been around for a long time now. I bitched at [Google] for years: Why the fuck can't we type in a question and get a decent answer? There's all sorts of pre-processing you can do with the computing we have now to put a lot more semantics in there, and look at the shit you're retrieving.
Because Google already gets into trouble when it prefers its own services or when it editorializes. Alan Kay should note that when one asks Google for what are essentially undisputed facts one often gets Google-formatted answers. Search for famous persons and one usually get the page formatted with an excerpt from their biography, date of birth, place of birth or upbringing, some basic information on what brought the person to prominence, etc. Generally these things are not disputed, so there's no real risk in presenting them in this fashion.
Now, if Google starts answering controversial questions, even correctly, they may face some real backlash that they wish to avoid from people that can't accept the answer. It's even worse if there is some legitimate dispute in a discussion, and appearing to side with one answer or another when something isn't settled can influence the discussion in ways that are not appropriate.
If you want straight answers, look at Wolfram Alpha.
US labor laws are often first-line enforced by state-level boards of labor, and there are large gaps in federal law that not all states make up. A friend of mine was having issues with an employer not allowing breaks, but it turns out that breaks are not federally mandated, nor are they mandated by this particular state either. We ended up having to take a different tack (turns out the boss had two businesses would avoid paying employees time-and-a-half overtime by switching which company they worked for during the week, this got them slammed with a requirement to pay all that OT plus some heavy fines from the state) but there's no guarantee that states will do their job to enforce workplace protections or to mandate them in the first place. Given what Wisconsin has been up to lately I would be surprised if they did enforce them adequately.
Yep. The computer merely makes counting ballots in a well-run election faster. It makes the paper the authoritative documentation, with the computer merely a tabulation device so that many fewer people can actually run the election to bring costs down.
Don't use the computer to take the voter input and then generate a paper receipt, use the paper ballot with on-site optical scan to record the result that the voter marked on the paper. If you want to get 1980s-fancy, implement an on-ballot print technique that puts one pattern of ink dot next to each entry that the voter filled-out correctly, and possibly another next to those that the voter did not fill-out correctly (like those pick 3 entries for county commissioners etc, or where the voter left the field empty) in case later manual review is necessary. Could even go so far as to generate serial numbers on the now-scanned-and-printed ballots, where those ballots that had issues have their serial numbers noted for manual review if necessary (ie, at a minimum if the voting is too close to call for some particular initiatives) and for that serial number to be machine-readable in the future (ie, also helps the computer know the ballot is already scanned, so that it doesn't tally multiple times if scanned multiple times). We had this technology with optical-scan "scantron" forms for school tests from at least the 1980s, if not the 1970s, so this should not be a hard thing to do.
If an election goes well then board of elections can perform a small audit, looking at perhaps a few polling places to confirm that the paper matches the electronic, and then perhaps a random sampling of ballots at other polling places, and then pat itself on the back. If an election goes spectacularly badly, the board of elections can hand-tally each and every paper ballot if necessary, because they were human-readable when marked by a voter. The ballots, not the computer, is the official result of the election. The computer merely helps speed-up the process of counting the results.
This breach is bad enough that Equifax officers should see significant jailtime.
Sure. And Chrome's versioning sucks and is where FF go its versioning.
And probably a plugin that lets me fake my browser's info to sites that ask.
Did that for FF 31 for a very long time, didn't really ever have functionality problems either. IMHO this current versioning system is complete and utter garbage as it no longer has any meaning. Used to be that the ones-digit meant a milestone. Tenths decimal was a major revision, possibly with additonal features ,but the look-and-feel remained largely the same and the user experience was similar enough that training documentation was generally valid. Hundredths decimal was minor, minor tweaks only, usually bugfixes.
most of what I see coming out of FF now is hundredths-decimal changes. Sometimes it's tenths. I'm not even sure when it's ones/units anymore. Maybe FF 57 would count. In short though, I don't really care anymore and I only use FF because I used Netscape and then Mozilla and then FF, so if FF gets too dissimilar to what I'm used to or too similar to other offerings then I probably have no reason to bother keeping with it anymore.
Yeah, I saw the writing on the wall with the color scheme shift that XP had. It reminded me of one of those keyboards for young children, and it did not seem to serve much of a purpose besides to make what had been a fairly slim UI (sizes of buttons, menus, spacing between elements) and increase it and make it child-friendly.
Unfortunately subsequent to the early 2000s it seems like a lot of people are trying their hands at UI design and they don't have the first clue how to do it because they're so used to high resolution, physically large displays that they don't get how to be minimalist in their approaches. That doesn't mean I expect people to design for an 800x600 screen anymore, but is it too much to ask for designers to not have horizontal scroll bars on my 1920x1200 display?
Mmmhmm. I don't remember what feature it was exactly, but some computer management dialog box was basically swapped between 2K and XP, a feature that admins apparently used constantly. The dialog box had all of the same stuff as before, simply reordered. Drove people nuts because it didn't seem to have been done for any purpose other than to give a reason for the version number to increment.
...UI designers are replaced with graphics designers.
One of the reasons why Windows 95 was so successful in the corporate workplace was the icon set and look-and-feel. Remember, at that time there were still competitive offerings like OS/2 and UNIX X-windows with CDE, and even Apple's MacOS. Windows 95 took some faux-3d experiments from Windows 3.1/3.11 and ran whole-hog with them to the point that it was almost weird when a legacy application still used flat icons or 2d windows.
Microsoft has regressed with its UI so severely that it's embarassing. They're basically back to 2d icons and a program-manager interface, and from my view it's change solely for the sake of change, not because it actually improved anything. Worse since they've fragmented into pre-metro and metro elements, there are essentially two control panels to take care of the OS where neither method contains access to all of the settings and where there's no clear division of functions between the two.
Service kept dropping out. Didn't have to pay for my modem anyway since we have the home telephone line, so they supplied the model with the VOIP capability.
COX just broke DOCSIS below 3.0, had to change modems.
I'd really wanted to use a DOCSIS HWIC module for my Cisco router, but COX specifically said that module would not be supported on their network, and then with the 3.0+ requirement, the 2.1-capable unit isn't supported anyway.
Really wish that Google Fiber hadn't stalled. Theres a dark fiber trunk line running through the neighborhood around 200' from my house, and Google was in the habit of buying dark fiber wherever they could.
Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever
After so many nights without adequate sleep we only feel that way...