Re: +Gordon 10
So a tinker's dam is a shoddy solder joint? Really?
Then why do people say in my part of the world that they don't give a tinker's cuss?
Posts by Martin
1436 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
'Knucklehead' Kansas bloke shoots self in foot
UK needs comp sci grads, so why isn't it hiring them?
Monday 16th May 2016 15:41 GMT 
Some things never change...
When I graduated back in 1976, I had a degree in Mathematical Physics, rather than Computer Science. During my first couple of years, I found that new graddies with CS degrees frequently had to spend the first few months of their career unlearning the bad habits they'd been taught at uni.
There were some exceptions - Hatfield Poly in particular produced excellent CS graduates, if my memory serves me right.
Stop resetting your passwords, says UK govt's spy network
Friday 6th May 2016 09:48 GMT
Re: Bruce Schneier
Me, I never type any password into a phone for anything important.
But I use a password safe and good old copy'n'paste if I do need to type a password on my phone.
So despite the Reg's sarcasm, I actually think that the advice is sensible. I use 12-char randomly generated passwords and a password safe.
Revealed: How NASA saved the Kepler space telescope from suicide
UK govt admits it pulled 10-year file-sharing jail sentence out of its arse
Thursday 5th May 2016 12:32 GMT
Re: @sikejsudjek
"When caught and tried for this heinous crime they were sentenced to 30 years each."
Bear in mind they were not just robbers - they were armed violent criminals who beat up the train driver and at least two other people. It actually was a heinous crime.
"This sentence, which was far more than usually given for murder, shocked the UK."
Murder was then, as now, a mandatory life sentence, with a recommendation for a minimum term. Thirty years, though significant, is less than life. And they all served far less than thirty years. And did the sentences really "shock the UK"? Any evidence for that?
"The result was that, knowing that the judges might be very harsh on robbers, the perpetrators started killing those police officers and members of the public trying to stop or arrest them."
Do you have any actual evidence for this remarkable assertion?
Thursday 5th May 2016 08:46 GMT
Re: ...
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I know Alice pretty well, and I am sure that phrase does not appear anywhere in it. But it's always good to check...good old Gutenburg.
And what do you know - the word "imagination" does not appear anywhere in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or in Through the Looking Glass.
It's interesting that the phrase appears all over the internet - most people believe that it's said by the Cheshire Cat. But it ain't.
So, it's quite a nice phrase - it might even be Lewis Carroll - but it's nothing to do with Alice.
Utah declares 'war on smut'
BOFH: Sure, I could make your cheapo printer perform miracles
Let’s re-invent small phones! Small screens! And rubber buttons!
Microsoft's equality and diversity: Skimpy schoolgirls dancing for nerds at an Xbox party
UK plans robo-car tests on motorways in 2017
I beg you, please don't back up that secret directory full of photos!
Bill Gates can’t give it away... Still crazy rich after all these years
Windows Phone devs earn double what poor Android devs pocket
Monday 29th February 2016 16:06 GMT
Re: Average?
Nah - doesn't need to be. The "average" is probably a mean, which is a very poor average to use for something like this.
It's like the "average bonus" figure that's given for an Investment Bank every year. It's normally something ridiculously huge, but it's massively skewed by a very few very high bonuses - and 99% of the people who get a bonus get below the average.
Similarly, a few ultra-successful apps (Flappy Birds being one such example) skew the average figure.
My devil-possessed smartphone tried to emasculate me
Friday 26th February 2016 09:59 GMT 
Chewed Moolah Bells
“I’m sorry, I cannot play with chewed moolah bells by your coal field.”
No, dickhead, I said Tubular Bells by oh never mind I’ll do it myself you cretinous, steaming pile of over-rated development failure.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Just brilliant. Laughed out loud. Have a virtual pint.
Hands on with Xiaomi's Mi 5: Great smartphone, but when do we get it?
Android users installed 2 BILLION data-stealing, backdooring apps
Reports: First death from meteorite impact recorded in India
Don't Fedex your tapes, people! We're so fast it's SANdulous – WANrockIT
Monday 8th February 2016 12:41 GMT
Is this an article or an advert?
Bridgeworks says this "performance makes off-site tape replication into a realistic and attractive proposition for organisations of all sizes," and that would certainly seem to be true.
Where on earth is your usual cynicism, El Reg?
Replace "and that would certainly seem to be true" with "but I for one would like to see these results repeated by someone else before I was in any way convinced."
Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!
Monday 8th February 2016 11:25 GMT
Re: But.... where are the netbooks?
How about a Chromebook? Some of those are really good now. And if you want Linux, use Crouton.
OK, you won't have 500GB disk space; but if you can manage without all that space (say with a NAS or similar) then you're fine.
You never know - you might actually LIKE using Chromeos as well.
You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors
Thursday 4th February 2016 13:06 GMT
I remember my very FIRST intermittent issue....
I was still at school, in the early seventies. It was a BASIC program which typed out (on a Teletype!) a horserace commentary based on a simulated horserace. It obviously needed a sort to decide which horse was leading, which I wrote myself.
It worked fine most of the time, and I'd have my friends all watching, cheering on their horses. But every so often, it froze - just stopped dead. Took me a while to discover that my handcrafted bubble sort had a bug - it used a >= instead of a > - which meant that if two numbers were the same, it swapped them, and the sort never finished.....
How to help a user who can't find the Start button or the keyboard?
Evil OpenSSH servers can steal your private login keys to other systems – patch now
David Bowie: Musician, actor... tech admirer
Tuesday 12th January 2016 12:37 GMT
Re: @Grikath Will anyone wheel out dusty Win98 CDs when Gates and Ballmer cash in their chips?
It should also be noted that if Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer hadn't done what they did, someone else would have. We'd still be using personal computers and cellphones; it's just that it would perhaps have been Digital Research or Borland or someone else who would have written the ubiquitous operating systems. (Or perhaps Sun Microsystems might have seen things better, and it would have worked better too.)
But if Bowie had never existed, we wouldn't have Ziggy Stardust or Station to Station or.....
I know which I think is more important, culturally.
LogMeIn adds emergency break-in feature to LastPass
Day 2: Millions of HSBC customers still locked out of online banking
Tuesday 5th January 2016 13:11 GMT
Really?
I am a First Direct customer and have been for ten years.
Their on-line facility is perfectly fine as far as I can see. What do you want different?
Their telephone system is also excellent, with generally very friendly and helpful staff - an exemplar of how a telephone help-desk should work.
Honestly - I don't work for them - I'm just a happy customer. It's difficult to believe that HSBC own them.
Australian government urges holidaymakers to kill two-factor auth
How to solve a Rubik's Cube in five seconds
Monday 30th November 2015 12:39 GMT
I wonder how many people have actually solved the cube?
Doing a cube fast is an impressive feat of dexterity and memory. But it's only dexterity and memory. Is it really that big a deal that a fourteen-year-old can do it in five seconds? I wonder if he actually solved the cube himself, as opposed to finding out how it was done on the internet?
The vast majority of people I know who can do the cube have not actually solved it - they were just taught. In my day, it was via a photocopied crib sheet or a book; nowadays, it's on the internet.
I solved the cube - I actually solved it, from scratch, without recourse to help of any kind - back in 1981. It took me about three months. And yes, I found it useful to dismantle the cube and rebuild it. The algorithms I worked out are not efficient - but because I worked them out myself, they are well and truly stuck in my mind. I can still pick up a cube and do it. Normally takes me about five minutes.
So, I wonder how many people world-wide have actually solved the cube, rather than just learned how to do it from some other source? I wouldn't be surprised if it's a few thousand at most.
iPad data entry errors caused plane to strike runway during takeoff
Monday 16th November 2015 11:54 GMT
This is incomprehensible.
We are talking about a bunch of figures which need to be entered accurately to ensure the plane gets off the ground safely.
a) The figures presumably have been calculated, and exist on some computer somewhere. Why the hell do they have to be transferred by hand into a iPad? Why can't they be transferred by some software system?
b) Even if we assume that they have to be typed in by hand, who the HELL thought using a touch-screen rather than a keyboard was a sensible idea?
I'm surely missing something. Surely no-one in their right minds would believe that this is a sensible and safe way of doing things.
Would they?
Drunk driver live-streams her slow journey home
Wednesday 14th October 2015 11:57 GMT
Re: What a stupid thing to do ...
I don't know much about Periscope - it's nothing I would be interested in. So I'm not sure how it works.
Is that title something she actually put into Periscope before the video started? Did she actually put up a live-streaming video onto the public internet which she labelled "Driving home drunk"?
Is it really possible that someone could be that incomprehensibly stupid, even when drunk?
Ubuntu 15.10: More kitten than beast – but beware the claws
Monday 5th October 2015 09:34 GMT
Yay - magic disappearing scrollbars.
My favourite recent example of the victory of aesthetics over functionality.
And what's really depressing is that, not so long ago, we Linux nerds were able to point and laugh at, say, Vista and say "Well, you'll never get anything on Linux sacrificing functionality for looks."
I need a "sad penguin" icon.
Audi, Seat, Skoda admit they've been fiddling car pollution tests as well
Tuesday 29th September 2015 08:23 GMT
Re: Never mind the fines, think of the SAVINGS
This may of been set to test the engine.
No, no, no!
This may HAVE been set to test the engine.
Or, so that it sounds like what you've written...
This may've been set to test the engine.
But please, please - not "may of".
This particularly egregious error is becoming increasingly prevalent - I'm really scared that in ten years time it will become acceptable.
Happy birthday to you, the ruling was true, no charge for this headline, 'coz the copyright's screwed
Thursday 24th September 2015 09:55 GMT
Wallace and Gromit will be happy!
In the original version of "The Wrong Trousers" Gromit opens a birthday card and it sings an electronic version of "Happy Birthday". If you buy the DVD now, it plays "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" - presumably because Warner/Chappell got on their high horse.
I hope they put it back again.
Vanished global warming may not return – UK Met Office
China eyes the dark, sorry, far side of the Moon
Apple iPhone 6S: Same phone, another day, but TOTALLY DIFFERENT
Ubuntu Wily gaggle builds 15.10 beta beachhead
Wednesday 9th September 2015 08:43 GMT
Vanishing scrollbars - can't wait !
GNOME 3.16 also offers some new scrollbars, which are now only displayed when needed.
Oh, joy. The fun of trying to scroll using vanishing scrollbars. The final straw for Unity as far as I was concerned, and the reason I moved to Kubuntu and Mint.
Look, one reason for having scrollbars is that it actually gives an indication that there is something more on the screen lower down. If a scrollbar only appears when it's needed, you may not even realize that there is something on the page below the bottom of the screen.
I am getting so sick of aesthetics being given priority over functionality.
Spaniard trousers €60,000 bank error, proceeds directly to jail
The most tragic thing about the Ashley Madison hack? It was really 1% actual women
The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined
Thursday 27th August 2015 09:32 GMT
Re: This mirrors the real software world
The days of trimming bytes of the code to fit it in 16K of ROM are long one.
True - but it was great fun!
I was particularly impressed with those kids keeping an eye on their grandad - we need more like this. So long as they are not discouraged from IT when they are fifteen by boys telling them that girls don't do computers, or other girls telling them that IT isn't cool.
Sony Xperia M4 Aqua 4G: The Android smartie that can take its drink
Auto erotica bonk shocker: ja das ist gut, say 56% of Germans
Computer Science GCSE male dominated, but geekettes are ready to rise
Friday 21st August 2015 08:59 GMT
Re: "Put down you ironing and get to the keyboard!"
Finally some secretary's that will know how to use word ;)
Oh im going to hell for this post !!!
Yes - a hell where you are permanently taught decent grammar and spelling. Most secretaries (not secretary's - sigh) can write far better English than that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
