Posts by Wibble

Re: Better than nothing

And the unfortunate sods who were 'converted' to full time employees can be sacked as they're "new employees".

As opposed to laying off all the contractors as they bare the risk of self-employment, i.e. they are contractors so aren't subject to employee regulations. Yet the HMRC couldn't give a damn about that crumbled 'pillar'.

As long as we remain healthily sceptical of AI we'll be fine.

Problem with inexperience is they'll trust all the BS fed by the purveyors of said systems.

Re: They should forget them the moment they send back a reply.

Bastard Telecom sets their shitty "search engine" as the default for unresolved DNS queries. They only ever do anything if there's money in it for them.

FFS you can see the curvature of the earth standing on a beach. Watch a ship disappear over the horizon. Preferably whilst quaffing a G&T.

Re: hyperbole?

Bet the code's not documented either! Comment, pah, they'd get someone else if they could understand it!

Re: The comparison

Maffs: 0.5 compared to 9 is about 18 times smaller

Re: Better stick with old stuff

Which is analogue (given that CD's were just entering mainstream in '85) and has no digital integration.

Now't wrong with that. And I bet it sounds lovely (without all that tsk tsk boom boom of today's sounds).

However, here am I sitting in the study with my extensive music collection on my lappie which connects to my Marantz amplifier using Airplay over WiFi; neither of which were invented back in '85, nor '95, or '05 (WiFi then was slow). The firmware update on the Marantz about 5 years ago added Airplay.

So as long as it's only Airplay (which is Apple-specific), all's fine. Otherwise it'll need some box of tricks to work. Unless it's Sonos, where it has little or no chance of being upgraded.

Re: I think you underestimate it...

> We can most likely thank ONE SPECIFIC PERSON for MUCH of this, the person that invented "the ribbon"

Thanks for naming the ribbon-creating Muppet. A UX disaster that succeeds in taking screen space and being hard to use at the same time.

Interesting that on a Mac -- where the UI/UX is not controlled by people who created the world's worst UI/UX, Windows 8 --- MS Office keeps the traditional menu system allowing the ribbon to be disabled.

CORRECTION: Podcast: 13 MINUTES to the Moon

Rats; just seen the typo. Sorry.

13 seconds to descend from 15km (50,000 feet) would probably have resulted in a moon landing failure. 13 minutes is far more sedate.

The title comes from the previous dress-rehearsal Apollo 10 which stopped at 15km. There's a couple of episodes which explain word for word the cockpit voice channel, e.g. what was a 1202 alarm.

Anyway, it's a most excellent podcast which I may well re-listen to if I find myself being abused with more awful Festimus "music" whilst in retail establishments.

Re: "Just in time for Microsoft's next attempt at a mobile phone"

...bungling everything it does aside from Office

You're joshing Shirley? Office sucks donkey balls. It's full of bugs that go back decades as MS dicks around with the awful UI -- making it worse -- and fail to fix basic functionality as it gets ever more expensive.

Re: More nonsense

OOh, good to see you here Mr Corbyn

Must be a bit of a challenge with all these contractors with zero hours contracts yet quite happily getting on with life.

Re: Electricity in the USA

And longer distances to travel? Isn't the range of a Tesla mobile circa 300 miles with 30 min fast charge, compared with >500 miles and 5 minute fill up on diesel/petrol?

Re: If it's Boeing

Problem is that all "modern" airliners - and all other forms of mechanical transport - contain so much software and we all know how crap software is. Turn it off and on again. Doesn't matter which manufacturer built it; Boeing happened to be caught out, but all the others probably suffer the same problems.

What a future we all have to look forwards to. Planes inexplicably falling out of the sky; cars inexplicably running off the road; ships colliding with things.

There's something comforting about the simplicity of mechanical systems, or even systems where the software isn't in control. AI just isn't intelligent, or not until it becomes self aware...

What are you doing Dave?...

> austerity....

Of course the side effect of increasing inflation is it devalues debt over time and the decrease in the pound makes imports more expensive thus rationing them.

The alternative to 'austerity' is what exactly? Continue to spend...? Sure, they could spend on capital projects, but we'd all be raped by Crapita, incompetence and bloody-minded short-termism.

You didn't mention the sainted Jeremy BTW... Is it just me who thinks Jezza has more than a passing resemblence to Davros, especially when he's doing PM's questions, Theresa's winding him up and he sounds just like like Davros too.

Re: It's-a rubbish!

> I wish I could bill MS for the time I spent

That's the root of this crappy attitude to testing: it's an overhead which can be offloaded to unpaid "enthusiasts". Unpaid means there's no contract, so no explicit commitment to quality, which is the raison d'etre of professional testers.

Staggering naivety on the part of the senior management at MS.

Of course, by extension, this naive culture means that *all* MS software will be unreliable, even the sacred cloudy software.

If only MS ended up footing the bill for this short-sightedness. When's the class action suit happening?

Re: Not turn them in to apps.

Notepad does need updating. Nothing much but having an undo buffer and little things such as multi-line tab indenting, column cut/copy/paste, maybe allowing multi-document tabs would go a long way. Sure, it's better than nothing, but only just.

Since 12.x is available on everything that supported 11.x, and results in performance increases over 11.x as well, there's zero reason why anyone should be unwilling to upgrade

What if you have some older 32 bit applications which aren't available in 64 bit?

If you can't obey the law, then you should delete it all.

What value does this data have outside of slurp central?

Re: Er, seemsd to have missed....

Garmin Descent is £1000 or £1300 if you want the cock-watch metal strap.

They've found that niche by going after rich wannabe divers. So a specialism in the sea of generics.

Re: Apple fix it or people will move

People won't move for that requires a change in operating system which effectively means moving to that Windos crapware. Apple may treat their customers really badly, but Microsoft.... Just plain no.

The new keyboards and Macbook Pros are horrible with a keyboard where it's hard to feel the position of the keys, not to mention are outrageously expensive -- the new Apple "Magic" keyboard is now £150.

Nowadays, being an Apple customer does leave one with the feeling of being treated like a wizard's sleeve.

Re: I would agree with only LEAs having full access

Can't help but wonder that should this pragmatic approach be adopted by ICANN that there needs to be some monitoring as some LEAs may sell their access as a revenue generation opportunity. Thinking of Hicksville TX not caring for those pinko commie liberals

Re: The ultimate question?

> The answer has to be 42.

The Czech Republic and Slovakia?

Re: Short term vs long term

Cough. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/

It was down this morning. Too much traffic for the maps to work. The Met Office was also attacked by the hipsters adding frippery over functionality, although the BBC has just turned this up to 11 with their vanity bonfire of a working site -- they've apparently deprecated weather fronts and isobar labels in favour of bandwidth-hogging satellite views.... FFS.