Posts by Notas Badoff

Re: "Shoving the ow into Windows"

Shurly it should've read 'ows'. Going on 25+ years for me. You really think I've suffered only one 'ow'?

Re: That's because everyone under 40 is a "web developer" now...

I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with you. Code quality inside the product is most dependent on the quality in front of the keyboard.

Yet, when people sneer at a language, I like to point to this quote:

"Finally, a note of caution. This language, like English, can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. The difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently."

Agile after Alzheimers?

Legacy application:

* underlying hardware isn't made or serviceable anymore

* underlying system software is not updated or supported anymore (e.g. compilers, libraries)

* original architecture no longer extendable (they've retired)

* application no longer maintainable (see above)

It's not 'legacy' even though still used, but legacy because practically and realistically "we can't go on this way!"

Without forethought and continual attention, software systems age and become fragile just as people do.

legacy: 4. A piece of ones' history left behind for following generations to experience.

Re: Echoing in Redmond

Normal computer coding involves just "0", "1", "many". Just have those three possibilities for the status board, and 5/7ths of the time it'll be the pleasing "many".

(Or do I have an off-by-one error there...?)

Re: I am concerned...

In all these comments the weightier, larger question has been ingored: Will this make me fat?

Re: Waste dumping

No, no, they'll just rename the whole effort. Remember when they insisted all those boats in the South China Sea - *all* those boats - were working on reef conservation? Who knew reefs require missiles, artillery, and destroyers for defense?

No, they'll just insist they're now into marshlands conservation....

Re: Sorely missed...

tearing off that plaster never felt so good!

Thank you Kieren - it needed to be done.

Re: It all seems a bit far fetched, to me

The contents of how many Olympic swimming pools would it take per satellite?

Although, to put a damper on the idea, there are a lot of scientists who'd be real pissed at you putting water vapour clouds _above_ the atmosphere and destroying their 'viewing' in infrared and millimillimeter wavelengths.

Re: How does this work?

It was voodoo. He was trying to put his wrinkles back on the cantaloupe.

Re: What's the problem here?

"Are the authors of the study suggesting that one randomly chooses masculine and feminine pronouns when talking in general about professions and trades?"

They do.

(I've been using the singular they for so long I'm astonished people are still hold onto their he things)

Re: Yet Another America - Fall Of Rome - Moment

I am all in favour of more people knowing about Social Credit System. Replacing the Five Black Categories with this new greyish Social Credit is so much more flexible when you might need to suppress *anybody* at a whim.

Think of your worst SciFi nightmares, and this duplicates or betters it. Your social credit depends on what your friends, family and workplace say and do. If they are not totally compliant, you can't buy a car/house, get a good job, enter a good school or any at all.

This is collective punishment 'refined', inspired by the cruder solutions of previous eras in that land.

Re: 4D Printing

World's first-ever 4D printing for ceramics

The 4th dimension is indeed time, or rather, time and heat or time and stretching. Print, then cause the final shape to (cough) unfold.

Re: ::shrugs::

Deleted Aug 2 as 'promotional'. Nominated July 2, so not likely related to timing of ElReg article.

"Non notable and promotional. The various listings as "visionary" all derive from the same source:PR. The other references are just routine financing and similar., and do not satisfy WP:NCORP DGG ( talk ) 23:55, 2 July 2018"

Actually, how lucky they are. There'd have to be a 'Controversies' section after all this, right? (And no, a controversy still doesn't make you notable enough for an article)

Win, settle... or sublimate

"until they either win or get a settlement?"\

Or the speculative funding gets cut and they go bankrupt. And eventually they evaporate into nothingness.

Re: UK's 11 main political parties

"Pity there are no other real alternatives to vote for. The right is crap, the left is crap and the centre is full of ' Don't Kows' ."

And there are no alternatives to the "Don't know hows"

Re: Nothing New

"Oranges grown in the south are sweet, in the north sour" is an old Chinese reference to nations and supposed differences between them. The most interesting version of the story is all about counting diplomatic coup. So posturing has precedent, yes.

But... the pessimist can imagine four coming developments following from reasonable security worries.

One is that any business or industry that is credibly critical national infrastructure will be required to show not only disaster recovery style duplication of internal infrastructure, but also that one leg of that duplication employs only 'trustworthy' components. Think banks, local governments, energy companies, and the like.

Second is that it might become hard to find everything needed from unassailable sources. And so each state may find it necessary to sponsor and support domestic component development. Quite like China has been doing for the last few decades. Or, hey, like the fallout we've seen lately regarding GPS?

And this might be hard for hardware/software development, since the personnel devoted must also be unassailable (not on visa for instance). And so not only will governments keep winding the STEM, but make it more urgent through national service. "The Marine Corps builds coders!"

And then we'd come full circle. Would a company $here hire someone who has been in national service $there? Y'kno, weaponized?

A pessimist's thoughts are nightmares. I'm not suggesting the above, but am at a loss against the natural progression of ideas. What do you do to guarantee a nation's (or union's) security in the face of a hostile untrustworthy world?

Trench warfare

Here I was thinking that "ad brokers" were basically "ad aggregators", but that's not really true. They are "hole aggregators", aiming to fill the holes on all those web pages. When they run out of jewels and gems, they fill the holes with turds, though wrapped in toilet paper sometimes. They turn your browser into a latrine. You knew this...

Re: To enable it?

These aren't the truth values you're looking for. ... Move along.

Re: "Tokyo Appartment Sized"

Hmm, did they mention if the aspect ratio was 2:1 ?

Re: Another "use someone else's server" service bites the dust

"we give you a prestigious email address for nothing ..."

They were members of the organization. To me that implies membership dues. For a membership perk from my dues, I think I'd much rather have a prestige email address than a one-time t-shirt with some idiot logo variant printed on it.

Re: sorry, but I have to do this . . . .

All too often now it is spelling by phonetic imitation. The latest jaw-dropper I've seen was a response to a question about shock waves in water, where the respondent mentioned a safe cracking method, which began with: "Get a settlin torch"

Re: Don't...

Nor a tourism agency "with an army and navy."

Trending now: "Stupid"

IQ Scores Are Falling in "Worrying" Reversal of 20th Century Intelligence Boom

Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

You hoped you were joking when you said this before, didn't you?

Re: Alternative

Think "speculation". The classic case of New York 'medallions' had the 'value' of a taxi medallion range from $25,000 (1962) to $375,000 (2005) to $1,000,000 (2013) to supposedly $200,000 today.

The price of a thing in limited supply (medallions/licenses) depends on the market. The government had nothing (and everything) to do with that speculation, at least in this system.

Unlike some other government systems, which figure the public purse ought to take advantage of speculation. "Hong Kong began license-plate auctioning in 1973"

One word: 'Miming'. I hear a bit'o'miming is very profitable these days.

Re: Self-driving, not self-stopping

They developed a self-driving car, and it was. They disabled the self-stopping feature. *That* was plain bonkers.

You get what you pay for, and tolerate.

There is controversy about it, but there is a continuing practice in our industry of rating people and ousting the lowest ranked n% each year. The same should happen for police depts.

In every crowd there is a small percentage that are responsible for the majority of misbehaviour. Getting rid of them, and being seen to do so, would go a long way to repairing the reputation of police depts.

We'd have to pay police better to get non-scum - I'm all for that. Insurance against riots...