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Comment Re:seen this movie before (Score 1) 259

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Comment Re:Hmm. and what about everything else ? (Score 2) 259

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.

Comment Re:Despite (Score 1) 259

It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

Comment Re:Something fishy... (Score 1) 17

That is the question.

I can see if they outsourced something and delegated a subdomain and the contract expired and then somehow the spammers got the IP's (hosting farm?) which had been abandoned and set up DNS.

But I've never been able to request a specific IP when setting up a VPS or colo, so it's kinda a mystery to me.

404 should have included the most basic of details.

Comment Re:Do not be a follower (Score 2) 28

The post at the top of the thread was about "AI". The following posts were about AI. Don't be blinded by the current hype into thinking that;s the whole picture. Just because other developments get less press doesn't mean they aren't happening and aren't important. In the field of biochem, most AI is *related* to LLMs, but is significantly different.

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