Re: The proof is in SAP GUI

I would say "SAP FOSS - ftfy", but I think it's my day off from being a neg-magnet...

Re: Enjoying Being exploited

I'm glad someone who's experienced it said it.

It's a tough subject to discuss without causing shocking offence to those who want to step in 'on behalf of' those with some degree of clinically recognised autism. Then again as most programmers know, the typical member of the public looking in on a bunch of software developers would consider placing the lot of them somewhere on that scale anyway. When you see some of the quirks of co-workers in an ordinary software shop, you soon learn to treat the term 'normal' as something fairly flexible.

So I hope this recruitment and employment is done in a way that makes the people feel welcome and valued, and in a way that's meaningful to them. And long may this agency keep up the good work.

And anyway, to the first poster, I ask, doesn't 'hire' and 'exploit' amount to pretty much the same thing? I mean, if everyone was paid exactly what they were worth to the business, how would it ever turn a profit?

Re: I see what you did there

At least someone did. But it seems at least three other readers need to go away and look up the difference between a 'tautology' and an 'oxymoron'...

Re: Same Sex Marrage

Isn't "Same Sex" and "Marriage" a tautology anyway..?

Re: Stupid question

The metal rod is not infinitely rigid. Therefore it's like a very very stiff spring. When you push one end, the atoms are momentarily compressed, and pass that force onto the next atoms as they start to move and so on down the rod. You're pushing against the inertia of the rod, making your end accelerate. That wave of compression passes along the rod at less than the speed of light until the other end starts moving too.

When you stop pushing, the atoms at your end spring back, and eventually the whole rod returns to its original shape. Now the whole rod is moving through your frictionless universe, but the whole rod (including both ends) is moving at a steady speed. There's no actual 'change' (read 'information') going on anymore.

re: biggest problems faced by architects...

It's that the functions cross boundaries without ANYONE properly realising it. It's the informal ways that data can flow; how people can bend when they recognise another's work is, at that moment, more critical than their own, that can give a business (particularly a small one) an edge. Yet none of that is captured in procedures; it's barely recognised more than one or two layers up the hierarchy. Yet without it, you fail.

But when it comes to putting those things in software, if the manager can't quantify it then what hope has a programmer got?

It's not enough to say, let's sit around a table and work out the differences in the lingo. If I'm a developer and I want to turn my software skills into a business, I need to learn business skills so I can play that game. So why should those with business skills who want to turn them into software only be expected to meet half-way? One of the things software development does is teach you to break everything down to the simplest rules and stick by them, no exceptions. If you want a special consideration, make a rule of it and add that in too. No exceptions. If a business process can't or won't play by those rules, it's never going to work as software. Half measures don't cut it.

Re: It starts with the architect getting off his arse and speaking to people.

Right there you're assuming an advantage most software teams don't have - that someone with a vague understanding of software is involved early on in drawing up the task, rather than having the requirement dictated by someone who doesn't even understand what they're asking for, never mind how they'll recognise it when it's ready.

Just look at all the jobs on offer over there ->. £20k for building web and .NET and C# front-ends for the back-end DB spaghetti that businesses accrue over the decades. Student rates. No-one writing the cheques is even slightly interested in hiring someone who might actually take a look under the rug, or ask questions, so how is this 'better product' ever going to happen?

Re: Apple already have that SEWN up.

'Nevertheless', surely?

"As ye rip, so shall ye sew". Wait a minute, that's not right either...

No, because it's vague enough to let them carry on scamming you.

Re: Well done ... again.

Beat me to it.

Until such time as one can actually direct the collapsed quantum state of one of the entangled pair then presenting the process as 'communication' is a fallacy.

Anyway, weren't we told just last year how 'quantum information' in entagled pairs can travel back in time? Reg, please stop re-reporting the pig-ignorant press spin on this sort of stuff over and over and over again.

Re: Dishonesty...

Quite so - it's the blatant and obvious bare-faced and demonstrable lie that angers me - that people do not immediately lose jobs over it, like anyone else in a commercial enterprise would for such deception.

Re: "There are two ways to approach Jodrell Bank"

Yep, forward from the past or backward from the future.

Re: Mike

Whilst they could probably hear things a long way off by placing an ear near the dish focus, it's highly unlikey to have worked in reverse without an aligned parabolic wall back at the school.

Re: Doctor Who

Precisely - for my entrance fee I'd at least expect to view a slightly scorched Tom Baker sized dent in the ground.

...and perhaps a nearby patch of celery.

Re: Just need a squad of Ho' dolphins

Not likely. They should make like the rest of the squaddies and knock one out over a copy of 'Cetacean Babes'.

Re: East Grinstead, 'no way I'll get down there for 7.30'

Me too. You wouldn't want to turn up late in case if he noticed YOU WERE NOT THERE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE talk...

Re: Or the tyrannosaurs & raptors

A few years back, LEGO introduced dinosaur hunter sets in the US only. The UK had a (literally) fantastic range based on Vikings and Nordic legends. Because of demand, they brought the dinos to Europe too, but not until they'd re-designed every single set to be animal-friendly, with tranq-darts and enclosures instead of hunting rifles.

Re: It'll all be in the mind

I think you'll find it is already in the mind. As in, it only exists in the mind of an AMD marketing bullshitter. Just because he's been given a budget sufficient to hire a jobbing TV actor for an hour doesn't legitimise a single word of the allusion to Sci-Fi technology. How about starting by figuring out how to make two people in the same room see each other as if a mile apart? Or make a projected figure appear to stand between them? I think the more important question is, has anyone tested this line of bull for horseshit content?

Re: Never mind Lego

They got a few frowns a few years ago when the first Batman sets came with uzis, but the recent Forest Police Station doesn't come with firearms.

It does come with a bear, though thankfully they're not American so they didn't arm it. Or have I got that the wrong way round again..?

Re: Krypton

Nevertheless, let's not invite them over for sunbathing until we're sure...

Re: I think that's harsh, even unfair.

> For all their faults, MS are trying to evolve towards a post PC world,

> where there are multiple input modes - touch, voice, keyboards, mice,

> and Kinect style controllers.

And when your key market is businesses running cube farms that's a really, really stupid thing to do. If this were MS reaching out to the gadget-hungry manager or trendy blogger with a sideline in mobile devices then it could be judged on its merits. But it's not. It's them trying to foist their all-fits-one-size approach on everyone and it's unravelling their business.

Now, back to what I was trying to remember - where did 'blaming every else' come on that list of 'how to spot a sociopath' I saw the other week?

Re: "quantum-entanglement-teleportation doesn't violate the rule"

No, it doesn't. Here's the macro-equivalent version of what quantum theory says is supposed to be happening.

You're given a pair of magic entangled dice. The rule is that when you roll them, one always comes up the opposite of the other. You roll a one, the other comes up six; two and five; three and four,etc. So you send one to your friend in Australia, then you both roll them together (you can even roll one before the other) and amazingly they still work together.

But here's the catch - if you look at them before they're rolled, the magic is broken. And you can only roll them once and never again. And if you try to make yours show a particular number, that also breaks the magic.

Now the quantum physicist will tell you that they're effectively rolling all the time, being all possible numbers at once, until you look at them. And he can demonstrate that by doing something else with some other dice as an example, but not on your pair as the test also stops them working. A cynic may suggest you've just been given a pair of dice where one is all ones and the other is all sixes, which is why you're not allowed to look, and the whole situation is as much practical use as a chocolate fireguard.

Re: "instantaneous reception of distant data is now feasible"

No, sorry, it's not. You forgot the 'quantum' bit. What they pass off as teleportation is they separate two things (without looking at either), then, when they look at the state of one, they can predict the state of the other with a high degree of accuracy.

It does not mean that they can force the state of one of the items and change the other, which you'd need to be able to do to send information. So no laws have been broken.

And if you're not entirely convinced by the idea of indeterminate unobserved quantum states in the first place, then they haven't actually achieved very much at all. Imagine rolling a die. Then, without looking at it, you slice it in half horizontally and post the bottom half to Australia. Now look at the face showing on your half and phone your mate in Australia and tell him what his half shows. Is he impressed? Probably not.

Re: "...able to leap tall buildings..."

I don't know, but running faster than the trains wouldn't count for much these days.

re: "I thought he was offering to PAY $500K to the volunteers..."

Forgive me - idle thought - What were you planning to spend the money on when you got there..?

Re: What a strange hodgepodge

I also think if you've got this far in life without installing Worms it's probably deliberate.

Re: Oh, I don't know

Well then, are you registered as an organ donor?

Re: Well, it all began about nine million years ago...

Cybertron? Nah, that's Unicron. Get to the ships!

As for not being a planet, 'planet' comes from 'planetes', which means wanderer. The nomenclature pre-dates the entire concept of orbiting a star.

Re: no peeks or pokes?

Yep, RANDOMIZE was the quickest way of throwing away the result of the USR function, without taking up any memory. More critical on the ZX81 than the Spectrum. The USR function executed a bit of assembly at the given address. It actually put that address into the BC register pair, and on returning, the contents of the BC register pair came back as the function result.

ULTIMATE / ACG favoured PRINT USR to start their games, but that was on the assumtion that once running, the game never would return to BASIC, so nothing would ever be PRINTed.

Though in-line or callable Z80/6502 assembly will be a bit useless in a Pi BASIC unless you have the equivalent processor emulator.

As for BBC vs Sinclair BASIC, they both had their advantages and their gaps in language terms. The only significant difference was that BBC BASIC ran a hell of a lot faster, but that's not an issue with these implementations.

Re: Yes but can it play Jet Set Willy?

I heard it got up to level 8...

Re: referring to coffee as a "perk"

And if you get that joke, sorry, but we were looking for someone younger for this position...

Re: The chances of anything coming from Mars...........

To make the same point, again, the methane is assumed to have got there first.

Re: Fine looking cow

On the contrary, I find something decidedly machiavellian about that derisory raised eyebrow expression.