Posts by Hans Neeson-Bumpsadese

Re: Now is the winter...

And the marquee used for musical entertainment, which had recently been fenestrated ...now is the window of our disco tent

Re: Not Just a Store

10 print "<obscenity>"; 20 goto 10'

You've just described pretty much every Saturday afternoon from when I was at school.

IIRC, one of my gang discovered a poke which could be used to stop the 'break' key from working on one type of computer. The only thing more fun than a stream of obscenities scrolling over the screen was an uninterruptable stream of obscenities scrolling over the screen. Of course, in those days it was quite safe for the staff to simply switch the machine off and on again...none of that orderly shutdown nonsense back then.

"NASA estimated that Wall-E is more than a million miles (1.6 million kilometres) past Mars, and Eve is further away at almost two million miles (3.2 kilometres)."

Er, 3.2 MILLION kilometres please.

NASA spokesperson Dougal Maguire explained "that cubesat is very small....the other cubesat is far away"

I was in a large hardware store a while ago and there was a major power cut to the area. I was quite impressed with how the staff handled it....

Two people per till

Person 1 had their smartphone open on the company's online webstore

Person 2 read out bar codes, person 1 looked up the prices, which person 2 wrote down on two separate bits of paper

Add everything up manually, cash transaction (having first jemmied the til open) and give one bit of paper to the customer as a receipt

Retain the other bit of paper to reconcile everything later on. I don't think they actually knew what that process was, but at least they came up with a system which kept customers moving (albeit a little slowly) and captured all the necessary information.

Re: It's "What's the best language" all over again

Coders today don't go through this painful process - I think this explains a lot.

I find that a lot of the "coding" that I see people doing isn't really building anything.

We need to do 'x', so hit Google/StackExchange and find a framework for it. We need to do 'y' - there'll be a library for that - have a look online...etc...

The "coding" process is often little more than wiring together someone elses' stuff....and when something goes funny in the end-to-end implementation, debugging and fixing can be a tortuous process. I can think of some projects where I've seen the developers spending more time fighting the solution than fighting the actual problem.

To be fair though, YMMV depending on the languages, etc. being used.

And then when they try to collar you for shoplifting....

"Are you resisting arrest?"

"No, you're just holding me wrong"

61 hours west of Dildo

The less-successful follow-up single to "24 hours from Tulsa"

Re: "...programming skills assessed only via examination..."

My usual development process then was to sketch a flow-chart, write the code, type it in and then test it - often on a live database as there wasn't any other kind!

Ahhh....the flowchart.

<cue shimmery harp music and wavy visual FX>

I remember getting a flowchart stencil from WH Smith when I was doing 'O'-level Computer Studies in the early 1980s. Served me well, and I hung onto it.

It's still in my desk drawer, and it occasionally comes in handy. Generally I'm happy to assist people with design work but if someone is being overly needy or annoying in asking for help with doing a design then I'll offer them the use of it.

Re: Two words for you ...

After what's happened in this saga, I don't think any sane individual would put money forward for a sequel project

Re: Droning on

The problem with this event is that it has demonstrated a new fun game for idiots, and I wasn't in the least surprised when the same happened at Heathrow only days later.

"idiots" being the operative word - never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity

Does the app have omnipotent permissions?

Only for the mass storage device

This isn't a black or white issue

Yes but there is an outside possibility that by September it will dawn on Apple that 4 figure prices for a phone is just STUPID

I actually think that they've already realised the stupidity of it...however, they've also realised that there are sufficient punters out there who are stupid enough to pay that much

Re: Look it's really quite simple.

With all the ISS coverage a couple of years back then I felt we definitely reached peak peak(e).

I concur. Actually I found the whole thing rather irksome at one point...peak Peake pique

Re: UK method is nicer

It also means the bosses have about a month of staff being able to finish or transfer their work in an orderly fashion

In my experience, the soon-to-be-redundant staff get paid but don't come into work. It's too much of a risk that an employee with a grudge will steal something, damage something or commit some other nefarious act out of spite or revenge. It's safer for management to just give them a few weeks of paid leave.

This is why test/development environments and production environments should never be the same network.

...and shouldn't use the same identity provider for SSO

Ah....so not just me then? I switched on Image-Lite mode, but I'm struggling to see any difference to normal.

Re: EE Shenanigans

Bad customer service - time to give them the boot

Re: "Machines can already surpass humans in specific intellectual tasks"

Also, you could fit of CPU cores into a brain-sized space if you wanted to optimise for space - if it was basically solid silicon with liquid cooling channels running through it.

but would those CPU cores consume less power than a light-bulb and fuelled by chocolate biscuits?

Re: Remember

I'm just a bit too young to remember any of the moon landings. The only Apollo mission that I have any memory of is the docking between Apollo and Soyuz in 1975 , which I remember watching on TV.

TBH, I don't think I really comprehended the significance of it. Older me really wishes I could go back and tell younger me just what an awesome thing it was that I was watching.

Re: Shoot it down?

This debacle seems to highlight something. The fact they couldn't shoot it down.

They could, but the risk of collateral damage is way too great. For range, a shotgun style weapon wouldn't be effective - you would need to use some sort of rifled firearm. Now, if you could guarantee that you'd get a completely clean shot at it and down it first time then that'd be OK. However that's very unlikely given size and speed of the target. Those bullets which miss the target need to go somewhere...and the range of a rifle means that there's a lot of potential for hitting something valuable and/or killing someone

sometimes you just want to see someone strap a bloody great rocket engine to a rolling chassis and find out what happens.

Given Yorkshiremens' reputation for thrift, I now have in mind some Last Of The Summer Wine-esq venture, with three blokes speeding down a hillside in a rocket-propelled bathtub

Re: Dimebag,....

So while there are issues wrt freedom and anonymity, there's also the problem of crazy stalker fans, and it just takes one with a 9mm to ruin your day.

Agreed.

The fact that Dime was killed in a country where it's perfectly OK and legal for people to buy 9mm firearms at the supermarket is also a factor...but that's a wholly separate discussion.

Re: Get a keg

No offence, but for that sort of price I'd get a proper pump fitted and buy kegs from the brewery. Much less faff.

Keg? No thanks...I'll go to a local real ale brewer and buy a cask.

Of course, beer in a cask doesn't keep as well as beer in a keg, so you have to drink it all in the space of a week or so.

Hmmm....I said that like it was some sort of drawback....I have absolutely no idea why I did that.