* Posts by J.G.Harston

3705 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

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...one thing that could help tackle both of those issues would be mixing residential and commercial, with shops and businesses at street level and flats above that

That's the one thing that's stopping me selling up my shop&flat. Because I *believe* that retail centres should be mixed with residential above and I should be participating in the community by helping to support the community.

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If the working week is capped at 32 hours, I far more prefer to work 10-4 five days a week than the crippling 8am starts I've been having recently. Some of the jobs I've been sent have specified 7am! start. When TF do they expect me to sleep, let alone do any of "my life" stuff?

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Building houses on a whim worked in the 1930s in the UK. Some of the best post-Edwardian housing in the country was built then.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

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Re: Dicks are Dasdardly

Clerk of Works? Weren't they all killed off in the '80s?

UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground

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I'm on 20/2 (really!) and I can't go to fibre because I'm *too* *close* to the exchange. It's literally the other side of the lane behind my flat.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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On this topic, anybody have any idea what shut down the entire Virgin media service - internet, TV, phone - for 16+ hours in Sheffield last week? It's the sort of huge outage that suggests burning down an exchange or similar.

Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO

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Eeek. I had a brief job in 1991 where we similarly all had admin level accounts. In fact, it was worse than that. Everybody was told to log on as user root! I thought that sort of nonsense had been killed with fire.

Using that access, I created my own log-in to keep a few files. Having been given zero indication of what I was supposed to do in the job, I spent my month or so there browsing the source tree and documenting magic number offsets into data structures as #defines.

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

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Re: ECDL

And it's fraud. A license is something you have to possess that without it you are breaking some law or contract. There is no such thing as criminally operating a computer without a license. This isn't the Soviet Union. It's very basic competancy certificate. It's essentially a School Leaving Certificate.

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Re: The worst job (interview) I ever 'ad...

I once told off my boss for using the office email to invite me to an Rail, Maritime & Transport union meeting. She replied, clarifying she was inviting me to a Regional Management Team meeting. ah.

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Re: The first one is free

Worse that that is recruiters and HR that you send your CV, covering letter, and completed application to..... WHO CAN'T EVEN SPELL YOUR NAME CORRECTLY. Y'know, the name that's there on the ******** screen in front of them in all the documents I've sent them

Move to Spam, add to blocklist.

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In my practice radio exams, the correct answers were in the column next to the answer box, with an ifformat(xx=yy, setcolour()) thing to highlight the wrong answers. I had to cover it up with my hand and resize it to make it invisible to do the exam properly.

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Re: Hypothetical Example

Yea glods! Yes, I've had the "the director calls, says it's urgent" thing. It's 10:58, the director can't get the OHP working for the 11am meeting. Well, he should have turned up a bit earlier to check the facilities before the meeting started, OR SCHEDULE AN UNDERLING TO DO THAT FOR HIM. Don't you have any organisational structure?

Dint get that job.

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I remember such tests, even the cursor keys were disabled! You were expected to even *navigate* via the mouse.

down down right ctrl-c right right ctrl-v, looks up, eh? nothing's happened. down down downdowndowndowndown Miss! Miss! My keyboard's broken!

Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7

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Hmmmm. I tried to access the Supermium website, and I kept getting either "insecure website" or "blocked by ISP virus list".

Brit chip industry wonders if UK budget will put its money where its silicon is

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Joke

Re: Situation Normal

If it doesn't break your foot when you drop it, it's not real industry!

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

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Hear Hear! Back in 1990ish I'd written 6502 code that correctly converted dates to days-from-400year-epoch (which then gives you day-of-week by MOD'ing by 7), and increment-this-date-to-next, all working. (Converted it to PDP11 a while back). Being a finite and managable set of inputs, it was easy enough to code some scafford to run through the entire set and check the output was correct. Dunt people do testing today? Or even basic sums?

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Do you want to know more?

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Re: For some of us, no.

My systems are fine until (digs into memory) 2107.

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Re: Time to go

I remember a few years ago the UK Benefits Agency had kittens when they hadn't accounted for there being two Easters in their accounting year, April the somethingth 20xx and March the somethingth 20xx+1.

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It's not accounting for things like that that gets senseless headlines like "coldest Easter in decades!" when Easter falls on, eg, 22nd March and comparing it with Easter being on 20th April.

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Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

Also happens to me every Christmas/New Year (in the northern hemisphere) as it is mostly dark - so no proper daylight reset trigger, and no going-to-work cycle - so no social reset trigger.

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Re: Antikythera Mechanism

I think you'll find the Moon really does go around the Earth (or, pedantically, around a point about 1/81th offset from the centre of the Earth).

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Re: Oh, come on - this is elementary

This is how we get things like Horizon. Littered with flaws that have been basic fundamentals of primary-school level computation for centuries.

City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do

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So......... where are the job adverts for the agency workers for all this extra work that's needed?

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Re: It's like a localised Brexit.

Sheffield says hold my beer.

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So......... where are the job adverts for all this extra work that's needed?

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

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Re: Ugh I hated SCSI cables

Yeah, I had one, until somebody "borrowed" it to tighten some bolts and destroyed it.

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

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Re: Flexi time

And I don't blame you. But this simply isn't a thing in the UK.

Ha! I had one job for about three months where I had no idea what I was doing until I got there at 8am. Quite often I would arrive at the Leeds depot and be told to report to the Nottingham depot. Impossible to plan, impossible to work out a schedule.

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

Off the top of my head there are three electoral roll managment products that a) all talk to each other, b) are robust, and c) came sround through highly tightly specified core functionality, discussion between suppliers and customers, and customers changing processes to make things work.

My local council has just been merged with five others, and part of that was merging six electoral rolls using (from memory) two different systems. First year: run the old systems while creating a naming scheme to uniquely identify each entry in six different sets; second year: run from the merged system while creating naming scheme for the unified dataset; third year: rename each entry to the new name scheme.

Included in that has been six local by-elections and one Parliamentary by-election, and everything can continued to run perfectly.

The Oracle fiasco seems to be a One Huge System problem.

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Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

Central government? Gawd!

My experience isn't at whole-council level, it's in elector roll and GP patient databases, and in these areas suppliers coordinated with their customer base to develop their systems and - *crucially* - the customer base changed their processes to converge on a smaller core of functions. Some big councils need to have their arse kicked and be forced to modernise and consolidate processes to reduce the amount of one-off custom spec modifications.

Yes, I hate "computer says no", but in some instances yes, computer says no, *you* change. Eg, we don't print three copies of letters, post one, and file the other two. The "filed" letters are just simply left inside the computer system.

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Dimming street lamps? You mean they're still using sodium incandescent lamps? I don't think the newer (cheaper to buy, cheaper to run) LED lamps are dimmable without considerable retrofitting.

Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades

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Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

"just imagine how hard it must be to live in countries that don't have to replace every single postbox, government form, uniform and banknote every time the head of state changes!"

Such as the UK. My local postbox is a VR one, banknotes are changed very few years to keep up with note fraud, government forms are changed whenever the content in them changes, uniforms change whenever some HR spod wants to give a millinary contract to a mate.

Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage

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Re: Daily Emails are a luxury

I did not know of the existence of CERN until the mid-1980s. Does that mean that CERN did not exist until the mid-1980s? Not *encountering* something does not mean the something does not exist. "The Beatles cannot exist 'cos that was before I was born."

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Re: Daily Emails are a luxury

Within a small margin of error I'm exactly the same age as the Internet, and was using it in the 1980s. As I remind people whenever I want to be a tedious bore. ;)

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Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ

There's two types in the UK, one for finances and other for medical.

Advice I agree with is: have "must be two" for finances and "any one" for medical. That way you're protecting financial stuff from rash rushed decisions where finances never need to be rushed that fast, but allowing medical decisions to be done quickly where such decisions sometimes do need to be done with urgency.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

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Re: Fork

I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't share address space", but very definely in early Unix your current process executed in memory from 00000 upwards as seen from the process in memory from 00000 upwards, and fork() created a process which executed from 00000 upwards as seen by the process sitting in memory from 00000 upwards. for (a=0; a<1024; a++) { printf("%02X ",*a); } would display the process's code in memory from 00000 upwards.

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Re: No DLLs

The problem is the plethora of programs that not only need v1.6 but need *exactly* v1.6 and die on a later version. Functionality should be >=needed not =needed. A program that requires v1.6 should - nay, *MUST* - work on v2.0. A program that depends on bugs in a particular version of support code, and dies when the support code is impoved, is broken code; similarly later versions of support code that kills working functionality of its earlier version is similarly broken.

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Re: Step away from the keyboard......

I used to have tutorials in 3B20 at university. Cottrell Building, Floor 3, Corridor B, Room 20.

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Re: We need a new Unix

I think confusing the GUI and the operating system is confusing things. The GUI shouldn't be seen as, or be part of, the operating system, the GUI is the graphical user interface with which the human user access the functionality of the operating system. People have been sucked in by pointing at the Window GUI and saying "that's Windows", when Windows is the operating system, but named after the functionality of the GUI that users use to use it.

Days after half a billion Asians went to the polls, Big Tech promises to counter 2024 election misinformation

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Humans have tried to stop humans communicating with humans for tens of thousands of years. It has never worked.

'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand

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Re: There's a reason pilots always do their own walkaround inspection

Martin, you did check that Arthur had retrieved the bottle of water from the engine exhaust, didn't you?

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Reminds me of how I found out I had a weird blood pressure oddity.

I was having a routine checkup as part of a voluntary "collect some data" thing. The medic attached a cuff to my arm attached to a fancy automatic tester thingy. "Just stand there while it takes your pressure".

Ok. Closes eyes and relaxes. Oooo, that feels oooodddddddd.....

CRASH! Wake up on floor surrounded by fragments of fancy tester thing that I'd yanked off the table as I passed out.

A few years later as a pre-op checkup, I mentioned this to my doctor as he prepared to take my blood pressure with, yes, another automatic thingy. "I think I'll pass out if I'm not sat down". No, it'll be fine.

CRASH!

It's now highlighted in my medical notes: patient must be seated when BP taken. I've no idea why they previously asked me to stand as my home test kit specifies sitting, and whenever I've seen BP taken in films and wotnot with the old stirrup pump and valve kit, the patient is always seated.

.

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

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Hey, that's the same code as my luggage!

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

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IT in the sense of "it uses electricity so it's IT".... I was contracted to electrically fit out a small office extension that had been created from converting a garage. Sockets, lights, etc. Did so, a small ring of sockets ready to patch into the existing system. "When can I turn the power off to wire in the extension? I need about an hour." Never, nobody's allowed to turn the power off, it must be on continuously.

"Ok, enjoy your new office."

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

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If there's an "AI goldrush" we should be in the business of providing shovels whisky and madams, not mining for AI.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

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Big Daddy?

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

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Re: What percentage?

And it has to be a proper power cycle. Turn power off. Wait several seconds for electrons to come to a halt. Turn power back on again. After replacing way too many PSUs killed by people flicFLIKflic-ing them, I screamed at one of them STOP KILLING THE ****ING COMPUTERS!!!! THERE IS *NO* REASON TO DO THAT OTHER THAN *DELIBERATELY* TRYING TO DESTROY IT. IF YOU DO IT AGAIN I WILL THROW YOU OUT OF THIS BUILDING.

WHY do some people think that the way to cycle an electrical device is to try and remove the power for a LITTLE time as possible?

aaaaaand breathe.....

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Re: Nice day for a trip to Scotland

Apparently, Bracknell is where the head software manager for Horizon ran away to and locked himself away from pestering programmers.

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Re: Remote people might be right

"It won't make a difference". Ok, I'll do it anyway, while I'm filling the job sheet and packing my tools away.

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Re: Had a similar thing happen

Piece of advice: keep a notebook. In loads of jobs I've built up quick-fix solutions by noting what fixed something last time. Eg:

"Zoom crashes - give up, reboot computer, don't bother trying get Zoom working, just kill the PC."

"Paper error XXYX: remove toner, there *will* be a sheet stuck inside."

"SystmOne *must* have a user's key-card inserted to allow Admin to configure system"

"If new installtion won't recognise keycard, just replace keyboard, don't bother fiddling with configs."

etc.