Re: My French is pretty poor...
It gets better. I think it's in Italian where "embarrassed" is used as a euphemism for "pregnant". Possibly French and/or Spanish too.
1230 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
Not as bad as PCs in crematorium that get full of dust. As you know what that dust is
Ah yes, Keith Richards' favorite nose candy.
Technically the ordinary household "dust" that can accumulate inside an innocent PC is even more "cadaver" than the remnants of a cremation, which are those common non-combustibles which make up our bodies, calcium, sodium, iron etc. Household dust, however, is largely those skin cells we shed on a daily basis, and usually a mixture of several individuals at that.
You have to allow for the overcrowding in the UK, especially in the south. Most places in the US you can do something with little chance of finding a crowd, except near the big cities. Anything you want to do in southern England, you have to figure on a couple of thousand people wanting to do the same thing at the same time.
Mockingbirds aren't that great to look at, and they're worse to hear. OK they're great mimics, but that's because they're incredibly territorial. Most time they just fly to the corners of their territory and squawk menacingly at the world. Bluejays are noisy too, almost as bad as crows. A cardinal in spring time, that's a bird to listen for.
It's common in the USA to wire a wall switch to a nearby socket to turn lights on and off, given that few modern houses have ceiling lights except in the kitchen. There's even a colo(u)r code convention on the wire. Black (live) goes from the socket to the switch and Red (secondary live) is supposed to come back, but if you only have cable with Black and White (neutral) you're supposed to put black tape or marker on the returning white wire. I like to break the bridge on a dual socket so that one of the pair can be switched and the other always on.
That said, you can buy a socket/switch combo that fits in the same place as the ubiquitous dual socket. What you do after that is limited only by your imagination.
I got news for the pundits: ordinary people tend to find uses for stuff no matter how much you look down on them. Seriously. OK, cat videos and Facebook are very non-U (even non-U is non-U these days), but they're what the drones like and that's how you sell hardware. Mass adoption of PC's got the prices down for all of us, now mass adoption of tablets does the same.
There's the use as a roving terminal, showing up in hospitals and retail establishments. I signed in to vote last November on a tablet. They're great for reading while in the waiting room. You can peruse El Reg while waiting to be probed, poked, and sampled. I used to take mine to Starbucks for a sit down and a caffeine boost, before that ceased to be an option. Modern life.
As long as we're replaying Red Dwarf scenes, let us not forget the scene in Backwards that has the line "I'm addressing the one prat in the entire country who's bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I'm saying. What a poor, sad life he's got!"
My sentiments exactly. Microsoft docs are accurately unhelpful, while Linux man pages tend to be comprehensively incomprehensible. My particular beef with M$ is the way their doc pages tend to give you trivial or pedantic amounts of info ("A FUBAR is a function to BAR a FU"), advertise that "you can do this! and this!" and then direct you to another page for "more info" which turns out to be "more of the same". In come cases a "suck it and see" approach is quicker than reading up on the topic.
Interestingly Rudyard Kipling, in a burst of Edwardian futurism, wrote some pseudo-news articles about "bat-boats" that were winning races by taking to the air, only starting and finishing in the water to show that they could indeed, plough through the waves in the approved manner. I think they were part of his story "With the Night Mail".
So far the very non-dimmable 1OOWeqv bulb I installed is not giving problems. The same could not be said of the generic doorbell button I tried to use to trigger the door from outside. It turned out that the new open/close circuit, still a two-wire affair like the older version but with added features, requires a clean break in the circuit to function properly, and the trickle current through the bulb lighting up the button was giving it fits. Removing the bulb fixed the issue.
And you thought that the imminent demise of fluorescent lighting would solve all problems? Guess again.
Apparently those economical, not to mention wonderfully programmable, LED bulbs have their own emissions that cause trouble. At least that's the case if the installation instructions on a certain brand of - here's the USA bit - garage door opener with wireless remote control are to be believed (if you think it's a luxury, consider living somewhere that gets snow by the foot on a weekly basis and whose winter temperatures only sound tolerable because they are in Fahrenheit and rarely go negative).
So said brand recommends its own version of the LED bulb for that light that comes on when the door opens, so you don't run over Junior's electric buggy. The "interference free" recommended bulb, of course, is a bit more pricey than the one at the home centre. Those of us who can spot a scam a mile away just use the bog standard LED bulb. Still, it makes you think.
Yet again it must be pointed out that personal flying transport is a reality: the Robinson R22 small helicopter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_R22
It's the right price, and too bad if you need all that certification etc. to fly it. It there were a better engineered solution, or one that was cheaper, don't you think we'd have it by now?
Consider also a certain Nick Mason, who flies his own personal copter, an Aerospatiale AS 350 Squirrel. That's personal flight.
The hidden message from the tech companies reads like this:
"We did it to him. We can do it to you too."
At the same time, normally rational Angela Merkel has compared this to her own country's policies, implying that because she is OK with a law that can ban certain kinds of writing and speech, then the corollary is that other kinds of writing and speech must be transmitted unless they too are banned by the government.
They don't care if it means destroying the company in five years, they will have left with a comfortable pay check long before that.
Even sooner if they can engineer a buyout by a bigger, more stupid company, a la the infamous Autonomy sale.
I mention this because the company I work for, having been spun out of another company after a buyout and now owned by.....well, anyway, they've started going on a buyout binge instead of trying to address the real problems at the coalface.
Consultants have always sucked. Back in '82 I had to clean up after two geniuses who couldn't even code a FIFO. Actually at the time, neither could I, but I learned really fast, unlike them. Fortunately the office had a real genius on staff who introduced me to the world of automatons. The rest of the staff were a zoo, including the manager and his conspicuously busty assistant.
Right. Too often the design is not what people want to buy, it's what salesmen want to sell.
Case in point: all the cruft on a "multi-function printer" aka a copier. At least they kept the Big Green Button and the Little Red Button.
Recent example: a medical steriliser with a GUI. User configurable parameters: zero. Lots of cruft for basically just opening the door, putting in the item, closing the door, and pressing "Go".
The reason that they should be fined is that their systems allow the bulk export of data.
Exactly. Remember all those "we lost a CD with 100,000 names, NI numbers and addresses on it" incidents? So many systems just store everything in plain text for anybody to download, instead of requiring a single lookup key to find a single item. It would be a lot easier to secure people's data if the sensitive parts were stored as hashes so that they could only be used as lookup keys. But even in the credit card world, people use workarounds so they can view actual numbers, rather then inputting them into the query to see if a given card is valid. Many data hosting services have to spend significant time purging out anything that looks like a plaintext CC number.
My thoughts exactly. By rights this guy should be in serious trouble with his employer just for taking a work laptop out of the country without proper reason. On the other hand, if he does use a personal laptop to log into GitHub, which is perfectly doable, then he's stupid for risking his own property like that.
Have the Reg reporters not been paying attention? Companies have abused the H1B system to replace US workers with cheap foreign labour. The new administration will no doubt restore the status quo ante on general principle. Complaints of "we can't find US talent" have to be taken with a large pinch of salt. They really mean "cheap talent" or even "talent that is not satisfying our deliberately impossible requirements". I remember when every Indian consultancy advertised CMM Level 5 compliance. Yeah right. So what do you get hiring them? You get what you get by paying peanuts.
A company I worked for not too long ago did the classic "we paid for it so we're going to use it" thing regarding the new company logo they'd been sold by the usual kind of suspect. It was just the name in an ellipse with a swooshing red line on the edge.
The CEO was apparently blind to the fact that such logos can be seen in the suburban US gracing many "mom and pop" establishments, including dry cleaners and petrol stations. The company probably shelled out a six figure sum to be counted in such distinguished company.
All the power sockets were 2A round pin items.
Very common at the time, I think, and certainly at York. The idea, I'm sure, was to stop students from using space heaters with all the attendant risks. Since 90% of said student body were technically clueless in one way or another, it was effective. The 10% who had gone for science had no trouble wiring up suitable plugs, not to mention bodging the timers on the room's actual heating device - an oil radiator with a blower - to stay on all the time and react only to the thermostat. I'm sure I left quite a trail of bodging behind me.
USAnians do occasionally avail themselves of a round plug in bayonet style, as in "stick it in and twist it" (but don't pull it out) that has its own style of dedicated socket quite incompatible with vacuum cleaners, air compressors (a favourite of US builders) and electric kettles. But these are most often associated with server rooms that even the sysadmins find it hard to get into. Casual office layouts have to make do with the standard plug.
RE: 2x4's
They're actually 2in by 4 in (50.8 mm by 101.6mm) when cut from the seasoned wood. But they get planed down losing half an inch (12.7 mm) in each dimension. There are actually wood merchants other than the big box outlets that will sell you unplaned wood, plane it yourself to your dimensions of choice. Of course the real aficionados buy the raw planks, bark and all.
I'm impressed that there was no fallout from the MicroVax II experiencing a power outage. I was unfortunate enough to be on a project where the bug testers would "push the white button" when a bug was encountered. Said button rebooted the machine without preliminaries, and usually left files in a locked state. Which would produce a secondary bug, leading to another report, another pressing of the Magic Button, more system chaos, rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, when I did resolve a bug, I would find the original report extended just because they'd seen something else that "might be related". In those pre-internet days, syncing bug lists between two locations was a sneakernet thing.
... almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
I suspect that the "instant tea" had more to do with making iced tea, and yes, Lipton's is the brand in the USA.
Even today, some Americans cannot identify an electric kettle as simply a water 'otter. Our venerable Morphy Richards, bought in a slightly upscale store, (i.e. not in W**M****) died recently and was replaced by a space age glassy thing which, to its credit, boils hard and fast, even if it does emit eldritch blue light in the process.
And then there was the guy in the USA who had to explain to the Feds why he was buying so many electro-mechanical goodies at the time the Unabomber was randomly blowing people up. He was actually producing the prototype of the "Tickle Me Elmo" doll. Being a lone genius working out of your basement has its drawbacks.
Good news: JavaScript allows almost anybody to program for the web.
Bad news : JavaScript allows almost anybody to program for the web.
How many unmitigated disasters can be blamed on this language? How much bork results from its ubiquitous use? How many web sites are in a state where nobody quite knows how they work, or if they are error-free? Oh look, you have -32768 days left on your licence. Your address is NaN Grafton Street. etc. etc.
Not that PHP, Python etc. are any better. Let's hear it for interpreted languages. We don't need no steenking compilers!
There's already plenty of abuse of free text. A recent Tales from Tech Support on reddit involved a hotel using it for credit card info, with the software OEM putting measures in place to trap such stuff, up to and including taking all suspicious numbers in free text and running them through the validator. Hotel responded by breaking the numbers across lines with asterisks in between. No doubt the OEM will respond, and the race will go on.