Death and taxis: Windows has had enough of clinging to a cab rooftop in the London rain Welcome to another instalment in The Register's irregular look at tech behaving badly in public. Today we present Bork on Wheels. A beloved sight on London's streets, the black cab has been through several iterations over the years and this incarnation has brought forth that very special Blue Screen of Death: the BSOD on the …
This. The number of times I've seen code where a preprocessor token has a negative in it ('ndebug' being the obvious one, but things like "DONT_WANT_FOO" and "NO_BAR" have been common enough). The difference between grokking "#ifdef BAR" vs "#ifndef NO_BAR" (or even "#ifdef NO_BAR" for that matter), for me, is huge. I mean, it's not difficult - I can work it out easily enough, but because there's a little bit of 'tripping up' involved in the mental comprehension, I do need to stop and double-check that I definitely have it the right way around. That really does NOT help when scanning through code, because by the time you've convinced yourself that you got it right, your mental model of where you are in the code overall has been lost.
The really big joke about advertising on everything everywhere is that increasingly nobody is taking any notice of it. It's become mere background noise that gets tuned out, and the more they fling at us the less we'll absorb. But the brokers will still make a bundle, and that's probably all that really matters.
" everything everywhere is that increasingly nobody is taking any notice of it."
Ahhh, but they do. The big boys make good use of plastering their logo all over creation. Pepsi and Coke are two biggies in the low-glow wars. Why do you think there is all of the signage in the football stadiums and on uniforms? Where would Chico's Bail Bonds be today without ads all over everything?
I gained a new exercise from a video add on my phone from some game. The one where you do a squat, rock forward onto your hands, shoot your feet out the back, do a pressup then bring feet back and stand up.
Makes my morning exercises much shorter, instead of squats followed by pressups followed by crunches I do these. I can do them really dynamically now. Not bad for a codger of 54, but then I've been doing pressups and crunches for decades so it was no real sweat to do it, just get it smooth enough for proper dynamism.
No idea what the add was punting, but ta for the suggestion guys.
This is a showpony/cut-down version of a burpie --designed as a shortcut display not exercise-- and hence a bit useless at generating fitness+strength. Suggest you try the proper burpie:
* From standing position, drop to pushup/pressup position.* Do a PROPER pushup.
* At the top of it, jump feet to hands (to a sort of squat position), then jump UP.
* At top of jump, lift knees to chest, clap both hands beneath your knees/calves.
* Land to stand on your feet. That's 1.
The clapping keeps you honest about hiking your knees up fast. A much easier version is clapping straightarmed above your head. Depending on your fitness+strength, the initial drop to pushup position can be via handsonfloor crouch or just kick your feet back, rotate as you drop, and land nosetoground.
As with all bodyweight exercise, you get dramatic benefits from maximum acceleration/speed. (First time I hit the gym after years of tae kwon do, I discovered I was benchpressing twice my bodyweight.) But that requires careful attention to form (!!), and requires careful attention to warming-/limbering-up and limbering-down (eg, 20mins warmup, 20mins exercise, 10mins warmdown).
> dramatic benefits from maximum acceleration/speed
High-school physics demonstrates one aspect of this.
Work = Force x Distance
Force = Mass x Acceleration
Acceleration varies with the square of the velocity change.
(Distance and Mass are "fixed" by your body size.)
Hence: double the acceleration, quadruple the work done by your muscles.
>>mere background noise that gets tuned out
Or in my case, I make note of industries with the most aggressive/pervasive advertisers.
These are items I assume I'm paying way too much money for.
In the US, I suspect the insurance industry is doing the most price gouging.
No national health care in my future...
Alternatively, the ads are so abundant and crass that you begin to despise the product or service the ads are about. Vehicle insurance companies and political "vote for me!" ads are prime offenders in this area. Instead of tuning them out entirely, they become the opposite of what they're meant to be, because they push you toward opposing products and services (candidates) just so you're not paying extra in order to help fund the ads that annoy you so much.
"London's black cabs have sought to supplement their meagre income"
Turn it in, black cabbying is a license to print money - ever seen a cabbies' tax return, one thing it wont iclude is the not inconsiderate amount of tips... Why do you think they can afford to buy decent houses and retire to Spain...?
Really, my heart bleeds......
Yes I have
if your turnover is below 85k and your a sole trader, you dont need to file details of everything. Turnover, costs and a profit/loss figure is all you need. Its the same for everyone. Go have a look at a SA103S and the guidance notes.
Of course, the accuracy of those figures is probably dubious at best. Same for any cash service trade like taxis, hairdressing and the like.
I just wonder at what point that these software companies making signage think that a windows license is worth the cost of deploying these, and all the baggage that goes along with it.
I'd have thought everyone would flock to a linux digital signage or something with loads less license fees; although looking at the digital signage market, the license fees are not cheap, and the ones I've seen in the wild haven't been any more stable than windows anyway. There was one by my car park that turned from a bulletin board to a digital sign, back to a bulletin board for like 6 months until they finally seemed able to fix it again. I'm sure they were glad that they paid all that $$ so we have a nice smooth screen to tape their paper printouts to again.
A Raspberry Pi could be configured to be a proper message presenting system for a hell of a lot less money, headache, heartache, & labour than even the most basic of Windows "solutions".
Give it wifi capability, point it to a central ad repository, & have it serve up those (filtered, vetted, security cleared, safe) ads for all & sundry.
No embaressing BSOD's with which to make you a laughingstock & fodder for stories such as this one must surely be enough of an enticement for even the most pedestrian of primordial of life forms?
Wait, we're talking about marketers, they haven't evolved up to primordial soup level yet...
Samsung "Stumpy" Chromeboxes are pretty much a dime a dozen on Ebay now. Reflash the firmware courtesy of MrChromebox, install Linux (Gallium is designed for Chromebox), and you have yourself a nice little 1500 passmark linux box for anything from PiHole, basic PC, ad-flinging box, you name it.
it probably had become terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up or down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways - as a sort of existential protest - demanded participation in the decision making process & finally, took to sulking in basements.
The best non-BSOD I've seen on the irritating video show screens some of the trains on the Kelana Jaya line have is an insistent message about duplicate IP addresses scrolling across the bottom. This is slightly worrying when the entire line is automated. Hopefully it is being controlled using a network that wasn't set up by the same bunch of cowboys who did the video system.
Although judging by what happened last year at KLIA[1], maybe I should consider walking to work...
1) The entire network servicing KLIA & KLIA2 was down for more than 48 hours. Main router failed. Fail-over to the HA system didn't work because that was also broken. They had to ship in new hardware and re-build the network configuration from scratch.
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