Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
The most patently dumb keyboards have, or had as luckily I haven't come across any recently (they get immediately skipped with prejudice) power and suspend keys on the keyboard itself. The most utterly idiotic thing to put on a keyboard near guaranteeing regular shutdowns in the middle of work.
The only other recent keyboard annoyance that comes close is the stupid default to special function keys rather than the standard function keys themselves. Press F1 for "help" and Wifi, or something random depending on the keyboard, turns off... seriously? Oh, and the swapping of the Fn and Ctrl keys on pesky Lenovo keyboards.
Historically one of the major stupid things was Microsoft's selection of a keyboard layout without the "Help" key that almost all other keyboards at the time had. Instead they chose to repurpose the existing F1 key...
That sounds exactly like what happened.
A "proper" application would have been considerably more sensible in this situation. Relying on an entirely arbitrary third party application which is not designed for the persistent of critical and irreplaceable data... is extremely poor design.
Google definitely dropped one with the poor update process, but the non-application developer really failed very badly here too.
Often the pig headed bastards will resume chomping paper after you've off and on agained them.
There are usually multiple print queues (spoolers)... in place and in some printing topologies there can be three, but there are often just the two.
Three: Local computer performing the printing, print server that spools the job to the printer and the printer itself.
Two: local computer performing the printing and the printer itself.
Technically there can be more but that's just sadistic.
In more extreme situations it requires that the Windows computer's print spooler service is stopped, the jobs manually deleted, and then the print spooler sevice restarted. On the odd occasion this has to be performed both on the local printing computer as well as a network print server.
who knows which way round your gonna get that plug......., hence the 3 pin plug/socket in the UK & other civilized continues, it GUARANTEES which side the live is wired....
I think you need to read more of these topics here! There is guarantee... just an indicated location where the live should be, definitely no guarantee. Which is why I tend to operate on the "trust nobody else's wiring" and test the connections first as this saves a lot of time, electrocutions and quickly identifying basic connection issues often indicates the quality of the rest of the wiring.
Whisk? Seriously, just use a blender. No need to waste time waiting for the batter to sit for an hour or overnight either. Use the blender again a moment or so before pouring, all it really needs is some air bubbles in the mixture and a last blend of the blender does this.
At least you didn't mention making a well, using a fork first, blah, blah, blah... :)
The ticket selling industry is so corrupt it's insane.
All they need to do is to insist on the name of the ticket users at the time of purchase, require adequate ID when using the tickets and to provide a reasonable and fair method of dealing with occasional change of ticket users... None of which is remotely difficult. Instead there have been found to be strong links between the sellers of the tickets and the touts of tickets selling for 10x or more the original price. Hmmmm. One could almost smell a conspiracy...
Depending how well sterilised every single space craft that humans have sent to Mars were, and typically they are sterilised very well on Earth, followed by many months of sterilisation in space, there could easily be dead life on Mars. Not likely to be very large in size though. There could even be very limited living life on Mars as a result, but most likey not as the extremophiles from Earth despite being incredibly hardy probably won't have survived the trip, the landing and then finding not much in the way of food and energy among the high radiation, thin atmosphere low in Oxygen and rather variable Martian temperatues that tend to range between extremely cold and very cold.
I strongly suspect that if humans deliberately transported to Mars as many different types of bacteria, extremophiles and assorted similar life forms that some of them would survive and possibly flourish for quite a while, possibly for a very long time. Mars may not wind up as a terraformed planet good for humans, but that's a different matter...
Most UX specialists are abject morons who have abolute no concept of whizz-bang-shiny. I should know, my thesis was on User Interfaces...
There is an enormous amount of value in consistency and "write-once" in the functional side of applications (Model and Controller in MVC). However there is considerably less so in the visual (View) presentation side of applications. MVC was a step in the right direction with this, however the non-text book reality is that it is genuinely impossible to cleanly separate the UI from the operational side of anything but an utterly trivial application - mostly, but not wholly so as one will necessarily dicate the capabilities of the other and they will wind up more closely linked than purists would permit. Being able to replace as necessary the View part of the MVC process is the dream, unfortunately just never well realised.
None of this was helped by Microsoft's abhorrent attempts to foist MVC into web browsers using the worst combination of JavaScript and non-standard components with a sprinkling of ActiveX along the way...
Remove (window) borders, remove buttons, mangle window title bars beyond all recognition, mystery meat navigation, inexplicable UI inconsistencies, daft belief that web pages are modal applications, throwing away web standards and accessibilities in favour of 400Mb of the latest JavaScript library behemoth collections that often just badly replicate browse behaviour instead of enhancing it, inconsistent user interfaces, dumbing down of everything while discarding all notions of efficiency, reproducability and accountability... yep. Welcome to "modern" development.
Sometimes I really wonder what the hell happened to quality.
Freedom Of Information requests do not apply in the USA (the "land of the free"... hahahahahaha). They only apply in what is currently* the free world, not the utterly corrupt world.
* Yep, it's going down the wrong** route rather fast...
** Unless you consider bribery, lying, insider trading and belligerent profiterring a good thing*.
*** Highlight politician of choice at this point: xxxxxx xxxxx, xxxxx xxxxxxx, xxxxx xxxx-xxxxx
Regardless of whether Assange is guilty of the charges that have been dropped in Sweden: holding him in largely single isolation in a high security prison is not an acceptable situation for someone who has skipped bail. He has really embarrassed some politicians and wannabe dictatorship regimes therefore the only justification that I can think of for this is that it could possibly be for his own health - he's not exactly a remorsless and likely to repeat murderer.
Sometimes I feel a bit sorry phone hardware designers... They put an enormous amount of effort into making devices that are generally mechnically superb, are as thin as possible and generally look good.
...only for the average user to stick them in the cheapest, nastiest, thickest phone case imaginable. Oh, and shatter the screen, that appears to be a requirement too.
There are Ads on El Reg? Where? :)
Seriously though - if these things were relatively harmless and non-intrusive then I wouldn't care so much. However auto-play, popups, pop unders, click tracking, content poisoning, advert injection, click redirection, content behind ad controlled doors and so on... bugger ye right off.
Also, with AdBlock (or similar), my web browsing is considerably less painful. There now many are sites that I just cannot use without an advert blocker because the numbskulls who run them think that the more adverts that they posion their websites with the more money they will nake. Not true. There are fewer views which, being a numbskull, they take as needing more adverts due to less income from them... and so it goes round until the site is 99.999% advert and occasionally a bit of real content.
Vista wasn't stopping you run software, it was telling you it was doing potentially dangerous things. Part of the issue was Windows programs were notoriously awful for security at the time, expecting admin privileges, writing files and registry keys in the wrong place etc.
It's a shame that Microsoft didn't do this with many of their applications. Data files in the Program Files path? All the damn time. Not acceptable.
If the password hash is intercepted and the password is weak (likely, the standard Windows password complexity rules almost encourage weak passwords) then it will be crackable within a short period of time. From 2ms up to an hour or two depending on complexity and if GPU accelleration is available.
Biometrics are an acceptable replacement for a non-secret component in authentication. They are in no way a replacement for a secret component, i.e. a password. However the marketing drones at certain international cloud/subscription software peddling organisations and Hollywood would have you believe otherwise.
I'd rather that it was socketed as well, however here are a few reasons why onboard memory:
Not a remotest chance of any of that. All this data is being used for is the training of quite primitive (but still very "clever", just not in an intelligent way) neural networks.
The media fixation and sales-droids lies about everything being AI are just that. At most, they use a small measure of carefully curated machine learning, most just have improved algorithms. However in weasel-speak these are "AI".
The most extensive neural network setup created so far, as in the closest we are to AI would lose a battle of wits with a fruit fly. While operating somewhat slower. And not being as flexible. And requiring a quite terrifying amount of specialist hardware to perform. A fruit fly is somewhat more efficient on the energy front too.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about ethics now of course.
It's a good point that the end result of the training should be the same, however one also needs to take into account selection bias. If the only images are those where the subject human has explicitly consented to their image being used in neural net training processes, this will almost certainly skew the selection of available images. For example, they are likely to be higher quality images of individuals who are more confortable having their photo taken when wearing a bikini.
Go back and read the opening line of the article you linked to. It said "other solar systems". Our own solar system is colonisable, it's just down to the will, the technology and the funding. Leaving our solar system would require either technology that does not exist or have any current real hope of existing, or generation ships that would have to somehow travel vast distances weighing an enormous amount and be self sufficient - both for resources and societally for a thousand years. The other option is the cryogenic suspension of humans, but that would also require technology way beyond what we can currently imagine - and the ship would still need to be entirely self-sufficient with no maintenance required.
The whole file interface in Microsoft Office has gone bad too. It now takes a scan around arbitrary locations on the screen to work out where the office application is intending to save the file, then if this not acceptable or to confirm this, it's a few more clicks to try and define or to set the correct location. The local computer browser in file explorer has also been murdered of course to make it as hard as possible to find drives (local or network) and to instead force the user to scroll and expand through a semi-duplicated list.
I'm not sure what particular relevance the UK's sales of good act has to the points being made here.
The (1998) Data Protection Act that the GDPR superceded provided a lot of wriggle room for the implementing states to apply things as they felt fit. The maximum fine was not set in the original Data Protection Act therefore it was up to each member state to set whatever values they felt appropriate. As for the UK always applying over the minimum regulation, that is not true as the UK chose to include only computer processed data in the original DPA even though the intention of the original act was to cover all mediums and other states chose to include all mediums as this was the intention. This kind of divergence is one of the many things that the GDPR has fixed over the DPA.
Tha's how I read it too. I read it that Twitter generated a list of advertising targets, twitter account identifiers, having been given a list of various identifiers to try and produce this list. This externally provided list included telephone numbers and email addresses and while it would have been acceptable, to varying degrees of acceptable, to match these to published Twitter account profile records, it was definitely not acceptable to match these against data provided solely for the purpose of account recovery and verification. In other words, while Twitter is correct in that they did not provide these personal details to an external organisation (advertiser) they did process the provided personal data in a manner which was contra to its intended and published and agreed purpose and therefore the processing was in violation of the GDPR. Even if Twitter did not provide the list of advertising targets externally, which I'm reasonably sure that they didn't, the abuse of the personal data that was not provided for this purpose is the issue.
Nearly... promising to sell shares to each other faster and faster while betting on the non-transactions and marginal changes in value as a result. All faster and faster but with no genuine transactions. It almost makes the historic fascination with perpetual motion machines look sane.
You think that's bad?
Consider the moon. Not only is the thing not made of cheese, of any variety, it doesn't even really exist. Seriously. It is nothing more than a circular disk stuck on a nightime sky-scape. I know this is true because I saw the Truman documentary which is obviously true becaue of the name. Also, stars are not real and are just stage lights.
Get with the program, sheeple.
Indeed, legend is pretty much a good description of them.
However it would be wrong not to include all the cosmonauts who also did incredibly brave things, and the people that backed them up and supported them. While very few individuals have left this rock, there are a huge number more who made this possible, often at great cost to themselves.
Somehow the litter of discarded punched cards in city streets has gone the way of miles of cassette tape abandoned down roadsides.... Things are a little less litter prone these days!
As for the millions of chads from punched cards and what happens when the container for those was dropped... eek. Impressive, but very messy. Lucky for me, I was on the very tail end of such horrors.
The resting state of the awful Samsung Kies software is that it does not work. On random occasion it may work and the unfortunate victim/user will then find themselves suffering with one of the worst interfaces and applications ever to be vomitted out of even Samsung (great hardware, appalling software and in particular user interfaces).
Generally, use anything except Kies.
So that they can support cross platform compilation and deployment onto legacy OSs that don't have a registry?
Or, possibly, because even Microsoft have realised what a clusterfuck the registry is and and are trying to revert this stupidity in their own applications...
Want to remotely recover an applications from a hung system. Are these settings strewn around in a bespoke registry setting somewhere? With the registry, you're stuffed.
Is the registry corrupted? Again? Then you better hope that you had a backup of the application's configuration somewhere. Yes, in a text file.
Want a tree of overlaid configurations where sunsequent configurations overlay each other (permissions permitting). Hey look, IIS does that using configuration files and not the registry.
...and it goes on. There are very, very few genuine benefits to an arbitrary database store of commingled settings for all applications on a system, but there are many benefits to have these settings distributed sensibly. A standard OS provided application configuration using a database file? That's possibly a good service for an OS to provide. One 'orrible bunged up binary blob mess of many things all rammed together? Definitely not.
Disabling Java on the web (in the browser), yes - that is a very, very good idea. Unfortunately some cretinous web application developers use Java instead of a genuine web application (hmmm: Oracle) which does cause security issues - as well as usability issues due to developers pretending that a website is a modal rich client application.
On the other hand, having Java installed on a system to run software written in Java... that is no less safe that any other execution of a local application. Often annoying juggling all the incompatibly Java versions, but that is different to security.
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