Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 81 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • If the pricing is itemised, you could price the impossible feature at an exorbitant rate.

    Either way, has your company previously sold this feature or is this just a mistaken belief about the existence of the feature that the customer has somehow invented themselves?

    If the feature isn’t on any of the customer’s previous itemisations and they’re the ones who made it up accidentally, suddenly seeing it on a new itemisation with a sky-high price tag might make them realise without explicitly telling them, which may or may not be what you (as the individual) want. I assume your boss will get wind of this one way or the other, so you could get them on-side by suggesting this idea.

    Is this feature something one of your company’s rivals might be able to implement or is this one of those situations where the feature would literally break the laws of physics? (Or mathematics, etc.) If the latter, it might be easier to come clean to the customer with a full explanation. If the former, your company needs to get on R&D immediately. Consult experts in the field. And that’s where the exorbitant rate comes in.

    How much of this your company shares with the customer is down to your chain of command. How much you share with the customer is down to how much it will affect you personally one way or the other.

    Lots of ifs, buts and maybes here. Good luck. I think you need it.


  • FWIW, I’ve a relative who dislikes fish, but who often makes an exception for local fish & chips. Locally the preference is for haddock which is what’s generally served, and what that relative gets.

    The same relative is less fond of cod, so I guess the advice there, if any, is if you try cod and don’t like it, try haddock. Or vice versa.


  • How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.

    Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.

    Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.

    And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.

    There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.



  • I tend to use right shift for pretty much everything. The arrow glyph has worn off the key I use it so much.

    Important factors:

    1. British English keyboards, like the one I have, tend to be ISO, with a larger shift key on the right. Bigger target. Easier to hit.

    2. I have at least a couple of passwords that each have at least one shifted character from the left side of the keyboard and it’s much easier to use both hands when I need to type those.

    3. It might even go back to the fact that most of my early typing was on a Commodore 64C and the positions of surrounding keys. Hitting shift-lock or run/stop by mistake would have been a nuisance. Caps lock isn’t quite as annoying because it’s not a literal mechanical toggle, but even so, the right shift avoids that particular error.




  • Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they’ll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can’t be bought?

    “So what, people can run with the last good codebase!”

    Sure, until there’s a critical bug that Google don’t publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

    And don’t say “that’ll never happen”. Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?




  • Somewhere around here I have an old (1970’s Dartmouth dialect old) BASIC programming book that includes a type-in program that will write poetry. As I recall, the main problem with it did be that it lacked the singular past tense and the fixed rules kind of regenerated it. You may have tripped over the main one in the last sentence; “did be” do be pretty weird, after all.

    The poems were otherwise fairly interesting, at least for five minutes after the hour of typing in the program.

    I’d like to give one of the examples from the book, but I don’t seem to be able to find it right now.


  • My parents’ house never had and still doesn’t have Internet. I was the one with the computer desk and it had a Commodore 64C and a 13" portable colour TV on it originally.

    It finally became an Internet desk at some point in the mid '00s when I got my own place.

    I’m still using it right now… and kind of afraid that if I mention its age, it will spontaneously fall apart.

    Let’s just say that it’s older than Google.





  • Mediocre at best, and I lack the mental fortitude to work at much of anything these days, so wherever I’m at, I’m not going to improve much.

    Some people relish the feeling of swimming through molasses* for the next hit of progress dopamine, or they don’t get that feeling at all, but that’s what happens to me and it basically short-circuits something in my brain. It’s bad enough that I struggled to write the last part of that sentence, and it’s happening while I’m proofreading this as well.

    * or treacle if the unintended concept of small mammal anatomy bothers you.


  • I’m sorry you’re having a bad time. I can’t fix it, but know that I wish that no-one had to go through anything like what you’re going through.

    Usually people who speak English as a second language are, somewhat surprisingly, fairly happy to receive correction. I see now that you’re probably not ESL.

    Since I’ve no idea whether someone is happy to receive correction or not, either I do so and hope for a good outcome - and maybe educate others along the way - or never correct anyone ever in case someone tells me to, well, you know.

    FWIW, I do know what its like to not be able to communicate properly with that horrible tip-of-the-tongue sensation, and I also know what it feels like to lose one’s mind as well as lash out in frustration. Been there, done that, with bells on.

    Not cancer in my case, but I’ve at least one close family member who had surgery and was on chemo drugs, so I can somewhat relate to that as well.

    And since I didn’t quite say it initially: I’m genuinely sorry I upset you and made you feel attacked. It was not my intent.


  • Grammar nitpick: “Whom” should only be used for people, possibly animals, and maybe other things in an anthropomorphic context like companies, robots*, etc. Extreme pedants would forbid its use for anything other than actual people.

    In this instance, “all of which” would be a better substitute for “all whom” in this instance. In fact, that ought to have been “all of whom” whether “whom” was correct or not.

    If you’d said “who” instead of “whom” it might not have awakened my inner pedant, but if you’re going to use “whom”, someone is bound to tell you the proper usage if you make a mistake.

    * recyclable or otherwise