The door lock failing should just disable the self cleaning mode

I don’t think cheesecake is difficult

Mix ingredients - how long? Until they are mixed. If a thing needs stirring for a length of time the recipe will tell you

Beef doesn’t go golden brown when you sear it

Golden brown is the colour of cooked wheat flour products - things toast to golden, they don’t sear to golden

Framework still don’t have open firmware

Gen X here. I agree torrents are for legit uses only

Usenet is the best for piracy

Which standard does Canada use?

Indeed, however the Americans stand out in the anglosphere

They said 1st as an abbreviation of first (it’s a normal abbreviation 1st, 2nd, 3rd … 7th abbreviate first, second, third … seventh)

If you want to be both wrong and confusing

If you want to use correct English and be clear don’t use ordinals: Say “index 0, index 1” etc

Save ordinals for contexts without indices: the first time through this loop, the last record"

Calling index zero the first is correct, but risks misunderstandings such as in the op comic

That is why many call index zero the zeroth index

First and 1st are certainly different symbols for the same concept

The spelling for the index before the first is zeroth, no need to insert an extra vowel

Americans also index their building floors from 1

A two storey American building has floors 1 and 2, where elsewhere they might be ground (zero) and 1.

Blame the restaurant for having a table identified as zero

Good luck standardizing English

0th (only first gets the -st ending; only second gets its end)

So it’s big and diverse ecosystem with multiple standards to choose between

The problem isn’t that it’s missing something like cpan, it’s that there are ten incompatible ones to choose between

Remind me not to learn python. If I get into microcontrollers I shall use their C++ like language not micropython ;)

I really like the ability to dig up code from twenty years ago and just run it

The worst is when the password manager (KeePass in this case) is in quick unlock mode in its default configuration “enter the last four characters of your password”

Me: like I can remember how my password ends. Just let me type the whole thing

How do you then activate cruise control for cool?

Working from home, connecting to a VM, you can use a password manager on your machine to log into the VM

And your home machine can be always logged on, or fingerprint unlock, or USB stick unlock or whatever

I had a boring job years ago. We didn’t have web access in the office, we did have a typing tutor program

I could already type

So I decided to learn to type again

So now I type on a dvorak layout except for the first login where I must use qwerty. About the time the password expires and must be changed I get to the point where it’s muscle memory in both layouts

Does python not require you to include your libraries? How can the runtime environment not tell you “you used whatever library but whatever library isn’t installed” is it then hard to find the library? Does python not have anything like perl’s cpan to consolidate all libraries? Can’t you just grep for the libraries a project calls and loop over the results adding that library to the build environment?

People complain about perl, but no one uses perl.

You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip

Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.

You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement

I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses

The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual

If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)

It seems trivial for the US government to tie data into TOR to data out. If you’re hiding things that government is willing to spend effort seeking, it’s not safe.

Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire

If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers

That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”

Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies

They were too greedy.

As much as people hate Musk, Tesla is unusual in that they allow you to opt out of all connectivity. Get no updates, send no video, audio, or data to the company

Disney will happily spend a million to defend against 50k if they have a chance of getting a court decision that their contract is valid for everything associated with the Disney brand

Australia has three mobile phone networks, so presumably in a different trenchcoat

But really in Australia the power is in the mining and fossil fuel industry, and especially in coal which is both.

One party wanted a carbon tax which would hurt mining (though less now than then as they have switched to electric everything due to reduced cost of solar and batteries) and fossil fuels and the press and television media went hard against that party and it’s leader (who was thoroughly vilified), causing our worst ever parliament to be elected at the next election

I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”

“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”

Then management shot themselves in the foot

Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.

Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.

Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team

Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later

So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.

Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount

I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing

I lost the only job I have ever left involuntarily on a helpdesk for a small system partly because of the tracking tools they used

I was top in the team by tickets closed. The person they kept was top by time per call (spent the longest time on each call/worst at efficiently fixing callers’ issues)

Tech tools are not a solution for incompetent management

I wouldn’t do that. I installed the software for them and set up their email and showed them how to do things. Linux was harder to set up back when I did that. Printers were a headache especially

But once set up a Linux box is no harder to use than a windows or apple one

It’s not surprising you can remove it, but it seems contrary to teaching good habits to not install it by default as a basic utility. You don’t want to train people to log in as root

Actually I think the only way I can log in as root is sudo -i

Pretty sure root has /bin/false as its shell and it’s configured as no login my machines

Surely any user planning on using arch would want sudo. I mean if Ubuntu desktop didn’t come with sudo I’d understand but arch? Linux From Scratch was a thing when I was still playing with Linux (rather than just using it) and that also was very much an if you want it, install it, but that suggested sudo as the likely alternative was the user would log in as root

(But I don’t see why VLC shouldn’t be able to run as root, if the user so desires.)

You don’t run VLC as root because you don’t especially trust that build of VLC

We don’t run random stuff as root because it’s a stupid risk. We try to only take necessary risks. Risks that make things easier. Running random programs as root gains you nothing and causes annoyance in that you need to fix permissions on its configuration files if you want to run out as a user

There is nothing stopping you though if you want to set up a Linux machine where you log in as root, run a desktop environment as root, run apps as root. You’re unlikely to be taking an unreasonable risk as a home user.

I feel like he has a machine that someone set up for him, and he can’t escalate permissions, because he’s on a basic user account.

The normal way this works on a single user machine is:

1. You try to do something that is restricted to admin
2. Windows puts up a modal dialogue box asking if you want to do it as admin
3. You click yes
4. You do it as admin

But in that case he can’t have locked himself out of a file, he can only be locked out of things Microsoft think you shouldn’t muck with unless you know what you’re doing

I think we’ll see more office drones happy with Libre Office (perhaps even on Linux) to avoid the monthly fee for MS 365, not in the office, because few care about what the boss provides (except for the crap screens) but at home