Posts by Kubla Cant
737 posts • joined Monday 28th June 2010 14:47 GMT
You don't know where it's been
Prepared statements are easier to code, easier to understand, probably faster, and above all safer. But the world is still full of so-called developers who concatenate their SQL with whatever crap they just got from a web form. And they do it when authenticating passwords, FFS.
These are presumably people who'd pick a sandwich out of a urinal and have it for lunch. The surprising thing is that with this level of stupidity they can put together a piece of code that compiles and runs.
Look at it from the other angle
If I accept an delivery for my neighbour, I presumably accept responsibility for taking care of it and making sure my neighbour gets it. Will the Post Office pay my usual hourly rate for doing their job for them?
And how close does a neighbour have to be?
Re: The history of computing
@Alan Brown: you seem to be confusing the history of computing with the history of home computing.
The late 70s that you refer to was preceded by about 40 years of computing history, during which most of the important developments were made. The 30-odd years since then have seen immense refinement, but with the possible exception of networking, little fundamental change.
Re: Echo and SCORE
"SCORE was the first satellite to broadcast from space"
I should have thought the first satellite to broadcast from space was Sputnik 1. Not a very interesting broadcast (beep, beep, burble), though it sounds like it was the inspiration for Joe Meek's record.
Posted in The Grundy NewBrain is 30
Sinclair
My recollection of Sinclair in the pre-micro era is that it supplied matchbox radios and cheap but unreliable amplifiers through small ads in Practical Wireless. How odd to learn that the Labour government of the time regarded this as a key industry and therefore a target for nationalisation.
Imagine if it had all worked out as planned, and Britain had a nationalised microcomputer industry! We'd probably still be using hex keypads like the one shown in the article.
Re: Only 98 euros?
"laughing all the way to the bank" - this is the usual response to Spanish banks at the moment, isn't it?
Re: Escort - service
Worse - the details showed that a gallon of oil was used.
Posted in Dimming the lights on smart(arse) TV
Remote controls
Have the people who design remote controls ever used them? Ever watched anybody else use them?
I'm sure my usage pattern for the TV remote is not untypical. At least 90% of keypresses are EPG, Up, Down and Select. (My latest control uses the next/previous channel control to page the EPG, so that gets a fair bit of use for skipping past channels that do nothing but sell tawdry jewellery and weird ones like the channel that's apparently targeted at homosexual rabbits.) The other 30 or so buttons are never used.
So why is the EPG button almost always hard to find? Why is it so often indistinguishable from numerous buttons whose function is incomprehensible and others that seem to do nothing at all? Why does the down-arrow on the next/previous channel control move through the channel list in the opposite direction to the down-arrow used in the EPG?
And another thing, while I'm ranting. When you select a programme from the EPG, if it's microseconds before the TV thinks it's due to start, it asks if you want to set a reminder. My previous TV was worse, it not only did this, but if you pressed the button when the selected programme had already finished, it didn't even switch to that channel, just ignored you because you're plainly not as clever as a smart TV.
Re: LOL Ford
Not just Ford. I get the impression that most TV ads for cars show left-hand drive models, even, oddly, in an ad featuring people who talk in English.
Mind you, there's an ad at the moment for a car that you can drive under water. Can this be true?
Posted in The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored
Re: Sir
If I were you I'd take the mushrooms back to the supermarket and complain that they don't work.
Posted in The Beatles Yellow Submarine restored
Re: @ravenviz The Sixties
Er, me too.
No sign of the alleged final salary pension yet, and I've missed the boat for early retirement.
Another day, another way to enhance TV video. Could they perhaps do with a sign in the office that says "It's the content, stupid"?
"slightly longer than a bookie’s pencil"
I know El Reg loves unconventional units, but what on earth does this mean?
I've hardly ever been into a betting shop, so I have no knowledge of their pencils. Do bookies have special pencils? Why? Are they longer or shorter than normal pencils? Is that the length of the pencil when it's new, or when the bookie has sharpened it down to a stub?
And, FFS, what is "stylii" supposed to mean? If it were a Latin second-declension plural, it would be the plural of the non-existent word "stylius". The rule is "-us" becomes "-i" in the plural, not "just keep adding 'i' until it looks like a lot". If you can't grasp this, I suggest you stick to the English plural, which is "styluses".
"until the 1950s, computers were non-electrical calculating machines"
Wrong on two counts.
From at least the 18th century until the 1940s, computers were people who did calculations for a living. I believe the first electronic computers were so called because they were designed to calculate ballistics tables, a job that was previously done by human computers.
"Calculating machines" were called, er, "calculators". Before the 1950s they would mostly have been manually-powered, but I'm pretty sure electro-mechanical ones existed.
Isle of Man
As far as I know, the most famous explorer in history to have originated in the Isle of Man was Fletcher Christian.
So make sure you take a lifeboat on the trip.
For some reason my colleague Mr Paedo Burgles keeps having similar problems.
Oxbridge colleges and Zen-like questions
At my Oxford college interview, I was asked "Did Modigliani paint long thin people because he suffered from distorted vision?". I provided a logical answer: "No, because the visual distortion would make normal pictures look long and thin to him" and got the place.
Some years later, the Philosophy tutor who had interviewed me said, by way of a put-down, "We agreed to award the scholarship to the first person to get the Modigliani question right". I was delighted to tell him that although it might have seemed right to a philosopher, my answer was actually wrong. Perception of objects and perception of paintings are not the same thing, and people with severe astigmatism actually produce distorted drawings.
So much for Zen-like puzzles.
"...43 per cent of the population have medium or high internet skills – meaning they can make a phone call online or create a web page..."
This is a weird statistic because the range is ridiculously wide. A bit like saying "43 per cent of the population have medium or high navigation skills – meaning they can find their way to the shops or sail across the Atlantic".
Have you seen Windows 9?
The window is almost black and it fills the whole screen. All the text is greyish-white. The cursor is a big flashing square thing. When you press a key it makes a loud click noise. When you move the mouse nothing happens.
For Windows 9 Home, the interface is called VT52. If you're prepared to spend the extra money you can have the Professional interface, called VT100.
Is it just me, or is the chart in this article distinctly baffling?
The left-hand is a set of targets, but the on right-hand side there is a time-series. Each bar seems to be intended to look like some kind of network patch cable. Some, but not all, have a percentage on the connector, and most, but not all, have a coloured L-shaped stripe coming out of the right-hand end, followed by another percentage on a black rectangle.
The legend seems to imply that the connector shows a percentage for 2009, and the L-shape shows a 2011 figure. If so, is it really claiming that 50% of households had Broadband better than 30Mb/s by 2011?
Re: "The Last One"
Exactly what I thought when I read the article. Every decade produces a magic solution that's going to put an end to software engineering. TLO, 4GL, RAD. The cloud is mainly different because it has a name instead of a TLA. It's still the same old snake oil.
I'm sure a large part of the problem is that "consultants" like this don't have proper jobs, so they're unaware of the thousands of vital business applications that companies rely on. They think "software" means Facebook.
@AndrueC "So they want next generation broadband...on the cheap."
The article actually seems to say that the suppliers have been asked to re-submit because they haven't tendered for what was specified, not because they were too expensive.
Posted in Kogan 'taxes' IE7 users
Re: W3 Validator
@Andrew 63: If you think you need HTML5 for web sites that aren't "minimalistic, plain, uninteractive", then you need to upgrade your skills. Competent developers have been building such sites for years, even in IE7 and, dare I say it, IE6.
Sovereignty
It doesn't really matter what US laws say now. The main issue is that the US government (or any other government, for that matter) can do anything it wants to in the future. It's an act of state. For US citizens' data, this is OK because they elected that government and they have the theoretical ability to throw them out.
European citizens whose data is stored in the US would have no sanction beyond saying "I'd rather you didn't", because we didn't elect them. Whereas we have control over data stored in Europe because we elected the people who run Europe and we can throw... Hang on... no we didn't, and no we can't.
Re: Feeling a little jaded
"I've never seen serious problems in a project due to the source control tool"
Try working with Visual SourceSafe. Your experience will be widened, not in a good way.
Digital Archery?
Left a bit...down a bit... Bernie - the bolt!
(Actually, "international law expert Alain Pellet" sounds more like digital air-gun shooting.)
Re: Too much added, not enough removed
"The amount of times I've had to correct native English speakers which there / their / they're to use it absurd."
How about "number of times"?
"... fixing english ..."
I think you mean English.
Re: Is not this called Pavlovian conditioning? ??
I don't think it is Pavlovian conditioning. It's Skinnerian, or operant conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning alone would only make rats expect food when they were dumped next to mines. The conditioning that encourages them to find the mines seems to be training.
Pavlovian, or classic conditioning starts with an unconditioned stimulus-response pair, such as salivating when exposed to a meaty taste. An unrelated stimulus, such as a bell, is introduced alongside the true stimulus. When conditioning is complete the bell elicits the salivation without the meaty taste. The order of events remains stimulus-then-response.
Skinner's conditioning associates a reward or punishment (known as positive or negative reinforcement) with a pattern of behaviour. As training proceeds, the reinforced pattern becomes more likely to occur, and, in due course, so do behaviours that tend to lead to it.
caveat this is 40-year-old knowledge, acquired at a time when my guiding principle was to do as little work as possible, so it may not be entirely reliable.
Posted in TiVo takes on Cisco in patent knock down
Re: What I want to know is...
Not really FF. Sometimes it just means record now+watch later, which isn't exactly cutting edge. It might also mean "pause live TV", which I guess is a matter of reading the early part of a file while the end is being appended to. If it was clever it could also treat the file as a ring-buffer so that you could do this indefinitely without running out of space. Dunno what TiVo think they have a patent on.
Rhubarb gargle gargle
"we have undertaken some early market and stakeholder engagement to define the requirement before commencing full market engagement in the coming weeks"
I see the Plain English Campaign still has battles to fight.
Re: @AC
@The Indomitable Gall "In which case Spreadex's business model is bad."
I don't know about spread betting (I'm not that stupid), but your comment suggests that you don't know anything about trading platforms.
The main differentiators between top-line systems and those in lower tiers is speed: how recent are the prices, how low is the latency. Owners of trading platforms typically put in lots of expensive features to enable users to make trades quickly. Entering a password before every trade is out of the question.
Crap technical support hours
I moved to Zen about six months ago. No complaints, but I was disappointed to learn that their technical support lines aren't manned 24 hours/day. 0800-2000 weekdays is almost exactly the time I spend out at work. 0900-1700 weekends isn't even trying - our village shop is open longer than that.
Historic streetscape?
Kensington and Chelsea are pleasant enough, but I think "historic" is stretching things.
The simple answer, of course, is to disguise the cabinets as parked cars. That's what all the streets in RBKC are already lined with.
Again!
Once again the Public Accounts Committee concludes that a public sector project was a stupid idea that wasted taxpayers' money.
Is there any chance of getting them to do this before the money is wasted in future?
Re: Taste
@dotdavid:
Excuse me, you just used the word "oly*p**s" in public. You're nicked, sunshine.
Posted in Vauxhall Ampera hybrid e-car
Re: No.
@fandom "if everyone drives things like these, a lot of money won't be sent overseas to pay for oil"
Quite right. It will be sent overseas to pay for natural gas, instead. Did you think electricity comes from nowhere?
Trifles
There is an old and well-known* saying "De minimis non curat lex", which means "The law does not concern itself with trifles".
Clearly this is no longer the case, and our Judges are in danger of getting jelly and cream all over their wigs.
*OK, well-known among lawyers who speak Latin. But well-known enough that it's usually abbreviated to "de minimis".
@boltar
"The desktop PC is going nowhere anytime soon."
I can't help wondering if this statement, interpreted slightly differently, is an important factor in Microsoft's strategy. Many business desktop installations seem to be happily stuck on XP. Cessation of support for XP doesn't really increase their risk, as there won't be many nasty surprises left in an 8-year-old operating system. None of the applications that require post-XP versions seem to have anything compelling to commend them.
From the perspective of a corporate IT manager, I suspect that desktop Windows upgrades just look like expenditure on licenses and user training with little if any measurable return. From Microsoft's perspective, it may be that upgrades to corporate desktops are pretty thin pickings anyway. Home desktops, meanwhile, mostly run whatever was installed when they were new, so Microsoft get the same sales whatever their latest operating system.
If this is all true, then it makes sense for Microsoft to be looking for footholds in new markets.
Re: Project Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre also wrote Huis Clos, translated into English as No Exit or Dead End. Just like following a lorry for hundreds of miles.
I notice the Swedes were sharp enough not to use their own motorway for this adventure.
Re: It is God Awful to be fair.
60 secs
Where can I get one of these new keyboards everyone keeps asking for?
Re: It is God Awful to be fair.
At least they don't appear to have spent much public money on networks or servers. The home page takes about 6 sec to load, so I'd guess it's running on an IBM PC-XT connected via a 1200 baud dial-up.
We iterate
Me too!
for (int ndx = 0; ndx < 10; ndx++) // can I have my £50k now?
Posted in Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Re: Wow
Yeah, but if you had an Aga, your oven would take about 8 hours to heat up, so you might want to switch it on while you're on the way in to work in the morning.
Or you might want to have it on a timer, like sensible people.
Posted in Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Most people install their cooker in the kitchen.
Unsurprisingly, the iAga fanbois (fangurlz?) have decided to have it in the music room. That piano's going to be a delight to play on with a few months of cooking grease on the keys.
Re: Why not run your own power station, too?
I know SMTP is an old protocol, but 18th century?
Re: time on mars
So who decided where the Greenwich of Mars is? And how? Has it got a dome?
There is obviously more on Mars than we've been told.
Don't know much about telephony
... but I assume that all the excitement is about making the radio part of a mobile network faster.
My experience of EE suggests that this will make no difference. The bottleneck is their data network that appears to use wet string as a physical layer.
Duplo(tm)?
I thought Duplo was big Lego. Then again,. I though Aero was chocolate, and Metro a free newspaper.
Re: One of you, folks, is in great danger
I've always assumed V for looking vaguely like a caret except upside-down.
