Posts by John Sturdy

Re: STOP. GIVING. FUJITSU. GOVERNMENT. CONTRACTS.

If that happens, the incompetent and irresponsible people behind it will move to whoever gets UK public sector contracts after that.

Re: One sub postmaster's story

Or inserted their own person into the dealer network --- probably easier.

Profane by context

A classicist friend once told me that every Ancient Greek word has three meanings: its literal meaning, the opposite meaning (for ironic use) and a smutty innuendo. I wonder if the filters try to remove *all* the words that could be smutty.

The position of the lioness on the cheesegrater is still a bit of a mystery, but may well get through El Reg's filtering regime.

Re: Not again

It does sound to me like there may be an element of what I believe is referred to in the USA as "pork".

It could work both ways

The latter possibility means the kids could keep the parents on the strait and narrow.

HP did something similar with QIC tapes

QIC tapes used a hole punched in the tape to mark the end of the tape, and most drives would stop when they reached the hole. Not HP's, though: they had a soft marker written onto the tape by a formatter program, and without that, the drive would wind the tape off the reel. And of course they sold preformatted tapes but didn't release the formatter program.

I think this was soon after they started to go downhill; I remember them releasing moderately crappy printers around the same time (mid/late 80s). I had previously thought of them as a reputable company but they subsequently spun off what had been the good bit to form Agilent.

Not everything they do will centre on monetization

I don't get the impression this is about getting them more income... more like worrying about their existing income streams getting broken by a massive production failure, caused by a change to something they import, and leading to paying customers moving away from them.

Re: Stop it, you're killing me!

It had me thinking "gold isn't what it used to be".

Re: Really a robotic chef?

I'd like to see it reprogrammed with recipes and techniques from Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time (see YouTube for some lessons from them).

Re: Oh god no

And you need to be trained in de-radicalisation.

Re: RedHat ... baaaa!

The pattern I'm used to is that corporations choose something in the Red Hat line for the servers, while the developers install something in the Debian group on their development machines.

So switching servers from RH may even reduce development effort.

Re: 6 million would probably be enough to do a good job of it, possibly world-wide

Those layers are what I was thinking of when I wrote that such projects "don't aim to employ a sensible-sized team of competent people".

A small focused support team can be helpful to offload the BS tasks from the techies, but keep it small and focused.

Re: Embedded SQL?

Another project / product in this area was CAFS, the Content Addressable File Store, which searched directly in the drive. I knew someone who had worked on it, who said it used a microcoded processor to do regexp searches as the data passed the heads --- none of this cumbersome "reading it into memory first" stuff.

Re: Probs just standard operating procedure

I didn't see the guns as relevant to suppressing a nominally possibly violent response; surely it's all about the message it sends to those who don't do as the state orders?

Re: How to convince people to get aboard?

Unfortunately, the way many people have flocked into tightly-packed socializing areas, and done whatever they can to get round holiday travel restrictions, despite the coronoavirus risk, leads me to think you're right.

Re: Parasitic businesses

It might not be the same parasitic chains.

Once this pandemic has gone, it could be a chance for local pubs to open in the daytime for co-working, meeting rooms, etc.

But some of those are owned by big chains anyway.

One place where I worked (decades ago) the head sysadmin said that the fire safety officer (from the fire brigade) told him that there were more fires caused by worn-out sockets from people unplugging stuff for safety, than from things left plugged in when not needed.

I find that hard to believe, but that line of thinking could lead to providing a switch on the socket.

Re: Linux and more

My favourite, in code originally written by someone with a reputation for assuming others would immediately understand his thinking, and then pored over by others who took some time to plumb the twisted depths, was something like:

/* A comment here would be helpful. If you can understand it without one, you need help. */

I think the code concerned used an indexing scheme that started at -2.

Re: I'm just rebuilding my desktop ...

The hot corner is the most annoying of those. Now you've given me the name of it, I will look for the (unfortunately probably GUI) way to turn it off :-)

Re: Dear Security Guy

Some people learn Emacs specifically because they want org-mode.

Was King Cnut the last leader to have any contact with reality?

At least he recognized that he couldn't hold the sea back.

I doubt they're aiming for autarchy

I doubt they're aiming for autarchy. It looks more like for a start they're keeping their options open if either China (who they have existing tensions with) or the US starts putting restrictive conditions on trade; and then moving beyond that, becoming a competitor with both of those.

If the USA votes Trump in again and collapses as a major technical power, and China starts to behave monopolistically, a serious design-and-manufacture alternative to both of those is probably good for much of the rest of the world.