Sure glad that my company doesn’t run Windows…

That’s impressive, even Google Translate is making up words:

CONTROL LAMP
HEATING
FECOLATION

According to DDG, that last word apparently appears on one page only:

https://www.sunsky-online.com/it/p/TBD078658301B/Baby-room-home-fecolation-creativo-tridimensionale-cloud-sterro-panno-capezzale-sospeso-scena-layout-puntelli-bianco-.htm

Which one, Left or Right?

I’d ask the manufacturer this question, point out your extreme allergic reaction to poison ivy when you do.

You might find that there is a procedure for specifically this situation.

Seems to me that they’re giving you ample incentive to migrate to another supplier.

Until you’re a local, I’d be taking their advice.

If you want more “current” information because you don’t trust the local “grapevine”, contact the local tourist information centre, health department and/or environmental protection agency.

We never got that far to test that kind of issue and while I’ve been reimplementing it locally to search through employment advertising, I’m not at a point where I’d be able to test such a thing.

The original implementation used a data store written by another team member and it made the original project much too complicated.

Today I’d likely use duckdb to implement it. My local version uses text files for a proof of concept implementation.

You store just the word count for each word on each URL.

The search is pretty trivial in database terms since you don’t need to do any wildcard or like matching.

As opposed to what?

Your joke aside, which I thought was funny did remind me that as it happens, the Swiss do an amazing job in making things internationally accessible.

Take for example their spectrum management system that not only allows you to search for categories of users, handles kHz to MHz data entry, gives access to the legal provisions and then the legislation itself, does so in four languages.

https://www.ofcomnet.ch/#/fatTable

Using the idea of six degrees of separation to get to any person on the planet, I came up with the idea to use a word cloud that would represent the top N words in all documents.

When you click on a word, (say “alpha”) the resulting word cloud would represent the top N words for all the documents with “alpha” in it.

As you click, bravo -> charlie, etc. the list of documents gets smaller and smaller, until just your required document remains.

This has several advantages, you don’t need to distinguish between words and numbers or need to “understand” the meaning of a word or interpret the user intent.

More importantly, the user doesn’t need to know the relevant words or vocabulary, since they’re all represented in the UI.

Enhancements include allowing for negative words, as-in, exclude documents with this word.

Who is “they” in your statement?

If it’s the company who is contracted by the government, it seems obvious (to me) that the requirements to make it open source provides the push to make it public.

If it’s the government, then I don’t understand your point.

A decade ago I participated in three and won several awards but was disappointed with the government response to all our collective efforts and stopped participating.

Specifically “not invented here” was prevalent as a response to projects that represented hundreds of man-hours of effort.

It was demoralising to say the least.

I’m not sure what the missing ingredient was, but two of our projects were directly related to government effort in relation to public transport and public housing. Neither went anywhere despite face to face presentations to senior stakeholders in the relevant departments.

The third was a search engine with a completely different approach to that in use by the popular engines.

Yeah, same kind of process in Oz.

AFAIK, it was triggered by doing an annual event called GovHack where people were encouraged to create “hacks” with government data. It included software developers like me, data mentors from many different government departments, people with an interest and several departments with questions.

Here’s Tasmania:

• https://listdata.thelist.tas.gov.au/opendata/

And here’s the ACT:

• https://www.data.act.gov.au/

Here’s some of what’s happening in my country, Australia:

• https://data.gov.au/
• https://data.wa.gov.au/
• https://data.qld.gov.au/
• https://data.nsw.gov.au/
• https://data.vic.gov.au/
• https://data.sa.gov.au/
• https://data.nt.gov.au/

Not sure where Tasmania and the ACT are at, but those links are the federal and most state government data portals.

Behind that is much variety of data, from land use to baby names and everything in-between.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has its own site:

• https://abs.gov.au/

Nothing “recent” about Microsoft hacks, it’s been happening for decades, the only difference is that the victim was you, now for a change, we have been made aware that Microsoft itself was hacked, but only because it impacted people outside Microsoft.

Microsoft was forced to reveal that it was hacked back in November 2023, and still hasn’t managed to prove that their systems are not still compromised today in July 2024. Just so we’re clear, their internal network was breached.

We also don’t know if it started in November, or if that’s just a convenient date because nobody externally has yet discovered evidence to show any different.

If the Lemmy repository was hacked and malicious code was added, people here would lose their shit. That’s what hit Microsoft and the fact that it’s only talked about in ICT professional circles is a good indication of just how bad this really is.

So, yeah, open source, open data, open governance, all of it.

In contrast, abandoned open source software can be picked up and updated by whomever gets paid to, where abandoned closed source software needs to be reimplemented from scratch at great expense to the tax payer.

Not only that, open source software can be adopted by the community (who already paid for the development through their taxes) for their own purposes. Consider for example the productivity impact on business that starts using tools that it cannot afford to develop itself.

Office things like document management, workflow management, accounting, but also tools used in the science community, transport and logistics, anything that government does is represented in some other way in society.

This is a big deal and I hope that it will reverberate across the globe and become the new normal.

Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.

That’s my understanding too.

It’s fascinating to see the difference in reaction in the post here, vs. the post it links to where they’re saying exactly the same thing that you and I are saying.

No idea what the difference might be.