Producer demands product be paid for. Consumer chooses not to consume. Film at ten.
Posts by J.G.Harston
3719 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
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Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan
UK dev loses ownership claim on forensic software he said he wrote in spare time and licensed to employer
At a job I needed a Unix fdump command, so wrote one from memory the one I'd written at university a few months earlier. A few years later at another Unix job I needed an fdump command, so again wrote it from memory, this time remembering to make a printout. Some years ago I was using Linux and needed an fdump command, so wrote it again from scratch typing in the printout.
So, this tool, written entirely by myself, once from whole cloth, twice from memory, in order to just get the damn job done, isn't mine? You're saying that if I use a bit of parcel tape from my bag to seal a box, that parcel tape belongs to my boss, and I can't use it in my next job? Do my pens belong to my boss? Does my car? I read something at work and I have to excise that chunk of memory when I go home? In Job C I learned this neat trick to do long division, when I leave I have to scrub my brain clean, and in Job D work out how to do long division again.
Forgot Valentine's Day? Never mind, today marks 75 years of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
President Biden to issue executive order on chip shortages as under-pressure silicon world begs for help
Huawei invokes 140-year-old law at England's High Court in latest bid to thwart CFO's US-Canada extradition
Housekeeping and kernel upgrades do not always make for happy bedfellows
UK college courses show decade-long surging interest in computer science – just as new intake was locked down
Re: Basically schools need to be fixed in so many ways...
But that's "Office Skills" - today's equivalent of 19th century "using a pen and paper". WTF do you need a degree to be able to type?
People are confusing and conflating "how to type"/"how to drive a car" with the IT equivalent of "automotive engineering".
Re: But what's the point?
If they're aspiring to do an IT job, WTF are they doing a computing science degree?
"I wanna be a bricklayer, so I'm doing architecture"
Alternatively, WFT are employers recruiting IT staff requiring a computing science degree?
"We need some bricklayers, advertise for somebody with an architecture degree"
Alternatively, WFT are universities calling their IT Admin courses "Computer Science"?
At the end of this bricklaying course you'll get a degree labelled "Architecture".
But what is a "computer science" degree? And what job do the people doing them expect to do? Most of the IT admin staff I encounter did something called "computer science", so either they are actually doing a university course in office admin - wtf???? you need a *degree* to do that???? and misrepresenting it by calling it "computer science" - or they are being ripped off getting into heavy debt studying something highly technical in order to do office admin.
How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use
"people aren't taught how to evaluate information presented to them"
Did they never go to school? That's a standard part of being able to do any form of school learning.
At least it was when I was at school in the '70s and '80s. How do you manage to get through the school curriculum if you aren't able to evaluation information presented to you? How can you learn *anything* if you aren't able to evaluate information?
Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.
Blatant misrepresentation, they should be in nick.
A license is legal or contractual permission to use a resource, without which you are acting illegally or in breach of contract.
It is *NOT* illegal to use a computer without a license.
The ECDL is a certificate of computer use ability, ****NOT***** a license. How they are allowed to claim or call it is a license is astounding, there should be all manner of laws they are breaking. Here, I'll write "TAXI" on this bit of paper and call it a taxi license.
My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?
Re: The Windows way
Definitely lazy programmers. I've been ranting about this for almost four decades. Things like code that does: "find machine type, declare that this machine has no clock" instead of "look for a clock, if there is no clock then there is no clock".
In fact, not even lazy programmers, it's worse than lazy, it's... well I don't know what to call it, people with a hole in a certain part of their brain... programmers. Being "lazy" would be assigning them more mental activity than they actually did.
Alphabet Workers Union hits Google data center contractor with labor complaint: We were banned from discussing wages, say staff
Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one
How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard
Re: Dodgy house wiring
I've had similar with stairs lights controlled by a switch at the top and at the bottom. The installers had clearly thought: there's an upstairs light and a downstairs light, so clearly it has to be wired into the upstairs fuse and the downstairs fuse. It was pure good luck I was standing on a ladder and gravity broke the connection when I discovered this.
Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks
Man arrested after UK school finds wiped hard drives on devices connected to network
Re: But Why?
"I'm curious to understand his motivation here."
Because he can. When I was at school decades ago, there was one chap who made it his mission to destroy the computer facilities.
No, I can't understand it either. My opinion was: why on earth would I do something to destroy my access to the very things I was going to every effort to have access to? "I love experimenting with computers, I know, I'll go to every effort to have my access to experimenting with computers stripped away from me."
Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity
"Who was responsible for generating the image for the laptops and checking that it was correctly and securely installed?"
Why one earth were education departments using the devices with the manufacturer's image on them in the first place? Every device we deploy we image ourselves before we let them anywhere near the users.
You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously
Re: Dirtiest PC
A new issue nowadays: I had a site call to a GP's where the keyboard smart card reader wasn't working. Before just swapping the keyboard I thought I'd pop the lid and just check inside. The innards were almost floating in clinical sanitiser from Covid wipe-downs. I gave up and just replaced the keyboard.
Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking
Re: Incremental improvements occur all the time
Another +1. When I came to the UK from Hong Kong, my rice cooker was one of my precious belongings that I brought with me, as well as my slow cooker. Dump loads of veg+gristle in before work, come home to a delicious stoo. Fill the rice cooker and set the timer, and DING! evening meal as you walk through the door.
You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify
Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm
Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button
Re: Fail safe?
In particular, windows that pop up or scroll onto the screen, just into place where your finger is milliseconds away from pressing the button you *had* targetted, so "open fire" is hit instead.
I almost shut down our sever the other day as something popped up over the start button as I was preparing to press 'log out' and 'shut down' scrolled under the pointer. Luckily it then said: This is odd, are you really sure you want to SHUT DOWN THE SERVER!?! Doubly lucky I was aware enough to avoid justbloodyclickdoitclickclickargghh!!!
Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing
Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere
`man units` tells me that the only remaining prefixes that aren't the same character as a unit are D I O Q U X - upper case are prefered for positive powers, and a prefix ending in -a (lower case and -o for negative powers). I think I and O would be ruled out for looking like l and 0, and X might be prefered to be reserved for 'unknown'.
So, Dottametres, Quinkametres, Umametres.
Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech
Union warns Openreach that engineers are ready to vote for industrial action over new grading structure
Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?
Re: AWS now liable?
People used to run BBSes on a computer in the corner of the bedroom. Then everything migrated to the Web, sitting on other people's computers in other people's offices. I can see a migration back to the computer in the corner of the bedroom, especially as hardware is so cheap and the supporting software infrastructure is so easy.
Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero
You hear that Zoom developers? When running on Windows use the damn Windows furniture dammit. Give me a bloody title bar, put the bloody close button in the correct place, dammit *HAVE* a close button, put window minimise and maximise buttons in the correct place with the correct interface functionality, respond to damn context menus, *DONT HIDE THINGS*. Let *ME* control *MY* computer, dammit.
Re: Keep your damn "OK" and "Cancel" buttons way apart!
*HAVE* Ok and Cancel buttons.
Zoom rant again. I went into settings, selected something, then spent several minutes looking for the OK button to instruct it that that was what I wanted. There isn't one. So, a) how do I confirm that's what I want and b) how do I cancel what I've fiddled with.
The standard "can't find a button, chuck this away" would be to click the CLOSE button. But that sets the settings as you've selected. LISTEN! THE CLOSE BUTTON IS NOT THE ****ING OK BUTTON!!!! DO I NEED TO GET THE BASEBALL BAT????
Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off
Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'
Re: Proof reader
When I'm proofreading I force myself to examine and read each word in isolation to bypass the pattern-matching. I'm doing some now for a neighbour (native Chinese writer, so in addition I'm trying to wrestle it into structural English*) and she can't understand why my proofing is taking so long "I can read that page in half a minute, why's it taken you an hour?"
*Eg:
You've changed deluded into delusive, I want it to say deluded.
But deluded is wrong, it's delusive.
Deluded is in the dictionary!
Yes, but. it's. still. wrong.
Re: Proof reader
~~ed and ~~es catches me. 's' and 'd' are next to each other, and I type them without realising and my brain edits my vision so I see what I thought I types... sorry typed.
Sometimes I even type the complete wrong pudding and even though my brain sent "word" to my fingers and the tactile feedback reported that "word" was typed, and my vision confirms that "word" was typed, I come back a few puddings later and it's completely pudding.
Amazon turns Victorian industrialist with $2bn building project to house workers near new headquarters
Women are 40% of Indian STEM grads and in just 14% of tech jobs. Not good enough, says VP Naidu
Exactly. The important numbers are the gender share of this year's STEM graduates with this year's gender share of STEM job applications and this year's gender share of STEM job placements.
Eg, for 30 years the NHS has had about 50/50 male/female recruitment, but it's only in the last few years that the workforce as a whole has got close to 50/50, because it takes 40+ years for the 90%/10% proportion who entered the profession 40 years ago to die off or retire.
Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go
The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'
Re: Sorting other people's stuff
They are, and we're constantly fighting Purchasing to get Financing to release sufficient funds to buy replacement kit, and in the meantime as a stopgap we're swapping them out for laptops with hairy masses of port extenders and hoping they don't melt a hole in people's desks
Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard
Digging up memories of 'O' level chemistry, isn't one of the issues also that the usefulness of an electric cell is related to how "far apart" the electrodes and electrolytes are chemically. With Lithium you're bumping up against the end of the periodic table, I think the next "best" combination is Ceasium-Fluorine.