Posts by Warm Braw

To be fair, they made it clear they wanted to end free movement.

Given that UK retail prices include 20% VAT and that the exchange rate is less than 1.3, there's not presently the discrepancy that you imagine.

When there is a larger discrepancy, it's usually because sufficient people will complain vociferously, but part with their money regardless, so why would you sell it cheaper?

That's depressingly close to the Brexit argument: we don't like the current, imperfect situation, we're unable to create a perfect world for ourselves, but we're sure if we just insist that someone else will do it for us.

Sigh...

Re: Hasta la vista

once USA resolves its presidential roadmap

Timing may depend on whether the US settles for just one more civil war or decides to make it the best of three.

Re: Can't wait to see...

There's not only the question of "picking the cronieswinners", but also a problem of scale: Apple's market cap is around 70% of the UK's entire GDP...

Re: More than vouchers needed here

I think what they actually need will be customs agents - or at least the 20% of FSB members that are actually exporters will do so. Vouchers aren't going to help with that.

If anyone sees the smoke from the Brexit bonfire of bureaucracy, do please share a photo.

Re: Testing? Are you having a larf?

needed even with a deal

Also, (parts of) it will be needed, even with a deal, for moving goods between GB and NI.

And most trade between the Irish Republic and Europe transits the UK to/from Channel ports.

But apart from that everything will be fine.

I wonder if Dom is planning to project pictures of the queues on to the walls of his E-mission Control [Warning: Daily Mail] in 70 Whitehall?

Re: Competence? We've heard of it.

When Nominet was first created it was a paragon of rectitude in an otherwise lawless landscape.

While its moral decline is regrettable, I can't help be amused that the current "business" regime have a licence to print money and yet can't make that work for them.

Classic case of their eyes being bigger than their stomach.

Re: "the total precision was actually 11 bits"

It's already clearly defined and it's mostly domain-specific for certain graphics environments and ML.

the UI and the OS are two different things

They really aren't. A reasonable Linux GUI needs something like D-Bus and reasonably performant filesystem notification so that the desktop can pick up on device hotplugging, directory views can reflect realtime changes to the file list, notifications can be handled, etc. It's only when you start creating the GUI that you realise what services the OS did not previously need to provide are now required. You probably also need a scheduler that can give priority to interactivity and assure realtime performance for audio and video. You might reasonably want to ensure the implementation of those services is appropriately layered, but in order to have a GUI you need an OS that has support for one.

Windows and Linux came at the problem from different ends - Windows focused on the GUI whereas it was rather more of a borrowed afterthought for Linux - but have ended up in largely the same place. The main distinction is that, having a commercial product to ship, Microsoft were prepared to blur layer boundaries to improve perceived performance - but that's an optimisation, not a fundamental design difference.

Re: I wonder how many UK Amazon workers voted for brexit?

I would imagine a sizable number are from the continent. The only vaguely credible benefit of Brexit was that the new immigration policy might have meant the likes of Amazon having to make their jobs more attractive (at least until they worked out how to eliminate them altogether). However, Covid unemployment has put paid to any chance of that.

Re: Just a reminder

Trump likes to think he was smart writing ' The Art of the Deal'

He likes to think he's smart in being able to persuade people he wrote it, despite Tony Schwartz being the actual author. And I suppose he must be smart, because millions of people buy the lies - after the Goebbels-level of falsehoods at the Nuremberg-style rally Convention outside the White House, his poll ratings actually went up.

The problem for Trump is that his only ambition is personal and the "America" thing is just bait for the voters; Xi's nationalist agenda is rather more sincere and he has the resources and infrastructure to work on it without the pesky interruption of elections.

if you want a high flying career then your employer is going to own your life

I'd rather assumed that a high-flying career would be one in which you had some kind of autonomy. It makes my depth-plumbing career sound quite attractive by comparison.

Re: I've used a lot of terminals...

a huge amount of effort was put into making the good old "shell" an effective way of interacting with the machine

Then it was hopelessly misspent. Using bunch of randomly-named commands with poorly-documented and often misspelled options is not an effective way of interacting with anything. It's also actively hostile if your first language isn't an approximation to English or, worse, doesn't use the latin alphabet. It also promotes an exclusive culture that demands you are initiated into the arcana before you can practice your craft (and I say that as someone who used to write JCL...).

Although I agree that usability has largely been forgotten in a lot of UI design, it's never going to be fixed if we continue to make a fetish out of yesterday's technology.

The world has left us all behind and become a nonsense factory

Unfortunately a goodly chunk of our fellow citizens willing work in the nonsense factory and avidly consume its production. If all of us had been left behind it would be less of a problem.

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

Fine, there is the door

I can't imagine why a community with such welcoming attitudes and openness to technological change says that it’s really hard to find maintainers. You'd think people would be queuing around the block to join them.

Re: International Recognition

mainly about power and politics

Indeed, but it does work both ways. Suppression of languages is one side of the coin, but the other is promotion of languages that have outlived their usefulness to construct a politically-useful "identity".

And no hard shoulder for added extra accidents

Indeed. Still, the more people that die, the greater the likelihood that drivers acquire herd immunity to impact...

Re: Meanwhile, in other news

There was a time - when it was trying to fend off monopoly accusations - that Microsoft was desperate to prop up Apple (with investment and collaboration over Mac versions of Office) so it could show it had a competitor, albeit one that was unlikely to significantly threaten its revenue.

Another time, another boot, another foot.

Re: One wonders

Speaking as an aging technologist, my first reaction was to wonder why this was perceived as a problem in the first place if it's working as intended.

I suspect the real problem is that it's suffering from an accumulation of poorly-documented changes that have been applied to deal with arbitrary government policy vascillation and that its replacement will, owing to the complex historic legacy of pension entitlements, have to replicate all of these features before accumulating future cruft and consequently be even less maintainable than its predecessor.

We have a government of journalists and spouses of journalists: it's precisely because they're only interested in the news agenda of the moment that there is no actual implementation to back up the attention-grabbing headline.

The AV referendum was deliberately set up to fail - it wasn't ever a real opportunity for change. Unfortunately, it left Cameron over-confident of his ability to engineer referendum results...

Re: You'd have to be mad -- or desperate -- to come here on an H1B

I'm now a citizen

I presume that in theory you could get a NAFTA work permit for Canada, but age gets to be as big a constraint as politics at some point.

British Government take note

The government that the present government likes to characterize as a "former" government, despite it ostensibly being of the same party and substantially the same manifesto, had no interest in state ownership and heralded the sale of Arm as a success. The present government is interested in state ownership of industry it sees as strategic (eg OneWeb), but very specifically to drive Cummings' technical fantasyagenda.

I fear it is unlikely any government would buy it for the express purpose of leaving it alone: the regrettable question we need to ask these days is what would be in it for them?

Re: So long as it's not mixed thread...

Quite. The whole ethos of UK education seems to be transactional: you do what's expected in order to get a piece of paper that lets you go on to do more of what's expected in future and if you step beyond grudging compliance your expected future is withdrawn. Nothing to do with actual value - or interest - in knowledge or research.

It would be a start to teach kids that the world is actually interesting rather than reducing knowledge to a selected list of facts that must be learned (even though they're mostly not facts....). And we might not have 22% of 16-24 year-olds saying they'd refuse a coronavirus vaccine. And if we didn't base educational attainment exclusively on exam results, we wouldn't have the current grading fiasco either.

But that's all hippy communism, I'm told by people who seemingly confuse recall with understanding.

Re: Thing is, would you even want to buy it?

You wouldn't. I wouldn't. Macs make up only around 7% of PC sales and less than 10% of Apple revenues and that's probably the sweet spot for ROI: they really don't want us ruining that.

Re: Damn those lone rogue engineers

I wonder if engineer Doe has been keeping his head down for the last 10 years or whether his activities in the intervening period have still to come to light.

realistically: Excel isn't going to change

Realistically, biologists aren't going to change. That's actually more concerning.

Re: Direct Line didn’t do their side of the work

It's hardly unusual that prospective clients don't have exhaustive documentation for their existing systems. It's always wise to sanity check the brief at an early point in the development - for example by processing a representative sample of existing data to check its conformity and ensuring you schedule your coding so this is possible. Whether it's legally necessary, the court will decide, but if you get to a position in which you've spent a fortune on development effort but find you can't actually process your client's data, noone is going to come out smelling of roses.

Yes but that is dishonest

It's called market segmentation.

When the first microVAXes came out they were rather expensive to produce which limited the number of potential customers when the usual margin was added. However, the development had been expensive and there wasn't going to be an immediate successor model. The solution was to take a proportion of assembled PCBs and fill the expansion slots with epoxy resin to prevent them being used. The resulting systems were then sold more cheaply to customers who didn't need the expansion capability - lower margin, but higher volume.

Re: But It's Shiny!

we like doing interesting stuff

It's been a long and slippery slope.

Back in the old days there wasn't much alternative to rolling your own: Phoenix involved writing an alternative to IBM's woeful TSO and repurposing a bunch of PDP-11s as async terminal concentrators. Teaching was largely done in BCPL, which was of no specific commercial value as a skill, but the compiler writer was conveniently on hand. Other commercially niche languages that formed part of an undergraduate course included LISP and Algol 68.

There is an argument for having your researchers and students contribute to real projects with impact on real users - it can be a great teaching and learning experience - but you'd be unlikely to get research funding to support operational services and a decent developer could get significantly better paid elsewhere, so it no longer works economically. Equally, given the rate at which programming languages come and go, there isn't any reason why you might want to teach those that are currently commercially valuable - it's the principles that count - but try telling that to someone paying 9K a year for their course.

I'm sure it's a similar story with Microsoft Office - students expect to be given it "free" as part of their course - so it's made available when it would be a useful lesson for most students that other office suites are in fact available, some without cost.