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.

I wrote the software for the 2 camera testers (one for integration of the CCDs, one for production) but... I don't remember ! I finished the soft 2 years ago. Anyway, it's B&W and probably 16 bits, but I'm not sure, I'd have to dig in the specs I have somewhere. The filter changer is some kind of crazy robot contraption because the filters are 2 meters in diameter, fragile as fuck and so expensive there's no duplicate. The camera CCD took years to assemble from individual CCDs.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth E. Boulding

Does this affect KDE running on X11 with Kubuntu in any way ? Last I tried Wayland didn't support VNC so that's a complete no-no for me. I don't care much about Gnome (besides liking that there's some competition), but KDE has always been nice on Ubuntu (except for the painful KDE4->KDE5 transition years [decades?] ago).

You mean the JFK documents that were released containing hundreds of social security numbers of federal employees? Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

I both agree and disagree with you. It *is* simple to install. My wife, my 5yo and my 80yo parents (and others in the family) all use Kubuntu because I installed it for them (and provide support, sometimes remotely via ssh+VNC). But if you tell them what you just wrote, they'll abort at the 3rd word.

Pro tip: Many automatic transmissions also start out in 2nd gear if you put the shifter in 2nd. They downshift to the selected gear as well.

AI is doing exactly what he attempted doing, except that he was hounded until he took his own life. And now it's somehow all okay.

I just re-read my post and went WTF. It's easy to blame autocorrect, but I normally read back before posting...

How were they storm on the first place? Chicken are stored only locally afaik. So the computer would have to be already compromised, no?

Maybe you went to a technical school with no humanities. Tech classes usually handed out exams with questions and response areas mixed together. Humanities classes with essay answers often used the blue books and separate question sheets. I assume that this is because essay answers vary more in length than technical computations so they didn't have to leave the maximum space after each essay question. Also, they probably wanted the notebook-style blue lines to try to improve the odds that the longhand writing was at least partially legible. (Back then, the available copy machines were all monochrome.)

Remember those little booklets of blank notebook-style paper they gave you in which to physically scrawl your exam answers under the watchful gaze of the proctors?

That was a blue book.

That must have been why flying was so much safer back in Ma Bell's heyday.

The difference doesn't mean a rat's ass to the customer. Either way, no phone call.

OK, but do you really want to go back to paying the current equivalent $10 per minute for the privilege of using a piece of dedicated copper for a cross-country call?

BTW, "nine 9s" is one just second downtime out of 30 years continuous service. I was there back in the day of analog long distance, and I can assure you that reliability was nowhere near that. For example, if you tried to make a call on Mother's day after dinner, your chances of actually getting through were often less than 50%.

Getting a "fast busy signal" when you picked up the phone was also a thing that happened at a couple of other random times per year for no apparent reason. I hate to admit it, but my current VoIP service piped over the crappy cable company's coax is probably just as reliable as our POTS line was 50 or 60 years ago.