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Comment Re: Is it time to kill all the supid UX designers (Score 1) 658

And why, in 2019, are symbols mapped into the font in place of letters? Shouldn't most useful symbols be defined in Unicode? How keypresses are translated to code points is totally up to the application, so a properly made application would just accept text input with whatever keys you like mapped to useful symbols. And then text should display however is conventional for the specific text area.

Comment Re:I think a lot of people have forgotten... (Score 1) 174

Let us assume that you are based in a location where the cost of energy makes mining cryptocurrencies unprofitable. Let us further assume that you have the capital to setup solar power generation. Would it not then be more profitable to sell the power at the going rate in that location, rather than using it to mine cryptocurrency? If I'm producing something worth X per unit, it makes no sense to use it in the production of something else, unless that something else is worth more than X per unit of my input.

Comment Re:It is always IT's fault (Score 1) 114

Just a quick counter point to your first problem. Lack of a (good, working, sane) chargeback system may cause needed work to not be done, if the people who need to do it are not on the same team/in the same department as the people who need it done. Think servers being built by developers - who can't continue work until they have been created - instead of having server specialists build them - who may in fact be able to build them better and faster. This happens easily when no chargeback system exist for the developers to "pay" the server specialists. Everybody works on tasks that contribute to their own department/team bottom line - but the total result for the company as a whole might be a lot worse than possible.

Comment Re:I mostly agree! But let's soften it a little. (Score 1) 483

The secondary market solves the problem of matching the time frame I want to invest on with the time frame companies need investment on - if I need my money back in a year, I can still invest in a company that will take 10 years to return the investment. Depending on how well that looks after one year I might get more or less than one tenth of the eventual profit - I might even take a loss. But since money is interchangeable and there is a secondary market I still get to invest.

Comment Re:Rogue-like (Score 1) 347

Charlie Stross - Halting State: Searchable voice tags... And the police are wearing recorders for evidence - there's actually a small bit of the story that involves the police not being able to prove their case because of having no video - Imagine a world, where confessions get thrown out of court, if the police can't establish continuous video from arrest to court hearing...

Comment Re:The Sony (Score 1) 684

Got a PRS-600 a little while ago and I totally agree on it being a good choice. The screen is a little bit grey on account of the touchscreen - but not so much that it bothers me. Everything else is just about as good as I could wish for (granted, eInk is a little slow on the update, but I knew that going in).

Comment Re:People aren't robots (Score 1) 709

Not every problem is solvable! Lots of real problems are in fact instances of unsolvable problems - then the very best you can hope for is to find a partial solution with the right properties to be useful. A practical example would be optimizing software for size - a perfect implementation would leave no unneeded line of code behind and would thus be able to solve the halting problem. Since the halting problem has been proven unsolvable, it follows that perfect optimization for size is not possible. Thus the best you can do is an algorithm that removes _some_ unneeded code while ensuring that exactly zero needed lines of code are removed. Not that the partial solution is not helpful - it is often enough to give great value - but that does not make it a complete solution.

Comment Re:silly (Score 1) 200

Since I haven't tried a CC+SVN setup, I would genuinely like to know, which features of TFS itcan actually replace? As far as I can tell, CruiseControl is for continuous integration, so I expect that it is comparable to the build features of TFS. SVN obviously delivers source control. But does CC+SVN deliver anything as far as issue/bug-tracking, planing and reporting on work done/outstanding etc? Because I think this is actually the more important part of TFS. The way checkins are actually linked to bugs/backlog items/requirements or whatever work items you choose to track adds a lot of value in making it easier to understand why the code looks the way it does.

Comment Re:I smell a government deal for MS! (Score 1) 119

It might not be a bad idea if something like this was mandatory for civil servants while on duty (maybe with higher framerate or even full video - sound would be good too) - then a digital record of what actually took place would exist - that might be useful to resolve some cases where the parties do not agree on what happened...

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