Posts by Kubla Cant

Re: Terms and Conditions and Conditions and Conditions...

I wonder how they prove who actually signed

I wonder if anyone alive can produce a recognisable signature on the digital pads delivery drivers use. I know I can't.

Re: Dear HPE

This is a bit depressing, actually. The company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard is massive, it was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007-2013, it's outlived or engulfed many rivals. Yet it turns out to be farcically incompetent. Where's the justice in that?

Re: Liability

@Phil S: Reading about your dragon-slaying exploits has almost reconciled me to the cost of my tyre. Thank you.

Re: Not an IT guy but..

What boggles my mind is the thought of a console that executes commands the moment they're entered, without waiting for the user to click 'run' or press F5 or whatever.

That's what consoles do. If it's a console rather than some kind of GUI there won't be anything to click, and function keys probably won't do anything. This is so you can use them in a plain-vanilla terminal.

That said, some databases distinguish between the statement terminator (usually ';') and the action command (e.g. '/' at the start of a line in the appalling SQL*Plus or, IIRC, '/g' in MySQL). But that wouldn't help in the present case as the paste buffer would probably contain the action commands too.

Re: Bribe

Like the bankers there is no justice for the big guys

Not so. They get the best justice money can buy.

Re: Justifiable tree homicide

Not disagreeing with your post, but I have to take exception to "tree homicide"*.

Paper is made from trees that are grown as a crop. When we use less paper, the result is fewer trees, not more. Nobody suggests we should save wheat plants by eating less bread (though in my case that might be a good idea).

* That should probably be "arboricide".

Re: If, if, and more if's....

In my world virtually all crashes are caused by human error... That is what these vehicles are being designed to reduce

The main types of human error that cause crashes are inattention, distraction, overconfidence, intoxication and impaired visibility. What doesn't cause many crashes is complete misinterpretation of the context. That's because we're using a perceptual system that's had millions of years of optimisation for our physical world, and driving in an environment that's been modified to accommodate the limitations of our perceptual system when controlling motor vehicles at speed.

Everything I read about autonomous vehicles makes it clear that they are a long way from this degree of general perception. For example, experienced drivers can infer the direction of an invisible road ahead by checking the line of telegraph posts or trees, and on country lanes at night they become aware of an oncoming car by the loom of its headlights long before they see it.

It's the sort of idea that could only have been dreamed up in a country full of grid-pattern towns and wide, straight highways. In 1911 somebody drove a Ford Model T up Ben Nevis to prove its capability. I can think of plenty of drives in Europe I'd like to see an autonomous car complete before I trust it.

Re: Any blame on Hertz for not actually being in charge?

Companies that outsource development to monster consultancies are both lazy and deluded.

Deluded, because they imagine that the consultancy has special access to a massive pool of talent that the company doesn't have. The opposite is true: read the comments here to find out whether people like working for consultancies.

Lazy, because they can't be bothered to run their own project.

Re: I read the news today, oh boy

Now they know how many turds it takes to fill the Albert Haaaaaall.......

I love to turn turd you on.

Re: What happened to testing?

Good point, but I believe ABS actually stands for Antiblockiersystem.

Re: destructive hdd check

The trouble with repeated confirmations ("Are you sure?", "Are you really sure?", "Have you actually thought this through?" and so on) is that they don't actually induce careful consideration. It tends to be more a case of Y-Y-Y-Y-ohshit".

A better approach is something like "Please type 'I REALLY WANT TO FORMAT DRIVE A:' to continue", with appropriate mechanisms to disable command recall and copy/paste. Even better would be something that changes every time it's used, but that would be tricky to implement on CP/M.

Re: Should companies be on the hook for criminal employees' doings?

I would rapidly take offence at a system designed on the premise that I was guilty of criminal intent and needed to be stopped.

So you'd never take a job where you need a pass to gain access to the office, then have to log in to use computer systems, and even then you can't access much of the stored data? I don't give much for your chances of finding employment.

Personally, far from resenting information security features that restrict my capabilities, I mostly value them. It's tiresome to have to jump through hoops to access anything sensitive, but it's reassuring protection against inadvertently damaging or revealing stuff.

unless they cough up corporation tax based on the spirit as opposed to the letter of the law

That's not how the law is supposed to work. It's a set of rules. Follow the rules, and it's legal, break the rules and it's illegal. If the laws don't say what they mean they should be changed.

It's also worth pointing out that the reason these multinationals don't pay tax here is because they transfer their profits to places where the tax is lower. I'm not saying we should reduce taxes, but governments can't be unaware that every percent increase has a measurable effect on the amount of profit that's exported. An intelligent government* would calculate tax rates to optimize revenue.

*The present behaviour of politicians on all sides, and the civil service mandarins who advise them, suggests that such a thing is an impossibility. Paying tax to this lot is like handing a tenner to a drunken beggar.

Re: Again, no compensation for victims ?

Exactly.

£10 per call sounds like a reasonable recompense. They made 51,917 calls: half a million quid should put a dent in their operation.

Re: What science museum

I have to confess that whenever I went to the Science Museum as a kid I was most interested in the glass cases that had a button to press or a handle to turn.

Re: More urban myths busted

Now he is a Tory MP in ERG group?

He was only a Tory MP, but he knew what the 'G' in ERG stood for.

Re: Oh look

The law to 'protect' us from terrorists being used to take down music and childrens stories

Of course. Fighting terrorism is hard.

Re: First thought was:

Funnily enough, I never, ever feel the need to take a selfie. I suppose I'm some kind of freak. I'm annoyed and baffled when I try to use my phone camera and I see myself on the screen.

Re: mandatory marigolds!

@Doctor_Wibble while you're shuddering at the unhygienic features of the toilet, allow me to remind you that the average computer keyboard is more unhygienic than the average toilet seat.

(Typed while eating lunch at my desk, on a keyboard that is visibly filthy. The joys of being a contractor! Oh well, that which does not kill me makes me strong.)

Re: Infernal inference

Anyway, the purpose of inference is that it makes code terse which can make code easier to maintain and less prone to error.

Up to a point. You're looking at a statement like:

val|var|let|const something = someObject.doStuff(foo, bar, baz)

and you need to know what the something is. So you have to find out what someObject is, then look at its methods to see what this signature returns. If the type was declared, you could save time and, more important, distraction from the task in hand.

IDEs are sometimes helpful, but it rather depends on the language. IntelliJ with Typescript - not very helpful. With Groovy - WTF is all this undeclared stuff that seems to appear by magic?

Re: In other news...

Does it ignore English-speaking humans more than it ignores Spanish-speaking humans, or vice versa? Or are all humans ignored equally?

He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

Re: Throw money at the problem?

...more cash firehosed at them...

Or a firehose firing a stream of pennies. Or maybe just a firehose?

Re: Oh if only...

Bdos Err On a:

Because they think long term

So they developed Edge, then dumped it when nobody was interested. Really long-term thinking.

a one-stop-shop full install for Jane/ Joe average, and not many tinker with "scary" installs

If that's true, how come most computers end up running Chrome or Firefox? Do the browser elves carry out secret overnight installations?

Re: Unexpected minion in arrivals area...

I recently used the passport scanners at Stansted. Although it was a quiet Monday afternoon there was a queue because everyone waited for the three scanners at the end of the cattle-pen and ignored the twenty available ones further down.

I too was told to "seek assistance", and was told to use the next scanner along, while the passenger from that scanner, who also had to seek assistance, used mine. It worked, but I've been struggling to imagine what kind of software feature responds in this way.

Re: AWS Postgres Aurora....

...what Oracle did to IBM and DEC many years ago - providing a more affordable product...

Not as regards DEC. We were happily using the RdbVMS database when DEC sold it to Oracle. We went along to a meeting at Oracle, where the explicit message was "Rdb is now going to cost you a lot more money".

One rouge TSA agent can loop in other TSA agents one time or another.

Luckily, it's easy to identify the rouge agent by his red face.

Parody about one of British accents does come of as patronising to us Scots.

You don't hear us English complaining about the 99.999% of ElReg content that parodies our accent.

Wearing them wrong

I think instinctively, living creatures do not want to needlessly attach foreign bodies to their head, especially eyeballs.

One of the annoyances of my glasses is that they slip down your nose. I never knew I was supposed to connect them to my eyeballs. I can see that might make them more secure.

The Huawei smart glasses in the picture seem to be sunglasses. Do they include a radar detector to stop you walking into things indoors?