Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution

Re: You could get into Cuneiform as an amateur.

Apparently (if I am remembering this correctly), the reason he is so well known, isn't just that he was a shit copper merchant, but that he kept all the "letters of complaint" from his customers in a kind of trophy room, and being clay tablets, when his house "unexpectedly" burned down, they were baked and preserved.

So, not only was he a bad merchant, he was a proper sociopathic one too. All you need to do to ensure your name lives on for eternity is to be a right proper bastard.

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

Re: Rate your skill level

I'm of the opinion that any developer who is writing code that saves things to a database needs to know, properly, how databases work. There's far too much "I only need to know my little bit" in the development world. ORMs are great things, but they really should be used to make the job easier, not to replace the knowledge. Their main problem is that they tend to produce unreadable SQL.

If you can't explain how an included column in a covering index is used, or why specifying maximum lengths for all your character columns might be a good idea, you should learn! Ideally, a good developer should be able to look at a query plan and tell you what is wrong with it.

Re: Rate your skill level

They should have asked "do you have the knowledge to do your job"

Due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, this would also be a useless metric.

The problem with KPIs and other metrics, is that the things that are easy to measure are the things that also tell you the least, and the useful questions are very difficult to boil down into a pretty "dashboard" for the C-levels.

Indeed. If you start off married life with that sort of attitude, you won't be married for long.

The "British way" you mention doesn't actually get the dishes clean, though. It might remove the food and grease from them, but it does so by solubilising them using detergents, and unless you rinse them properly, you end up with a thin film of that food and grease on them once they dry. Hint: if they're on the drying rack with bubbles on them, they're not clean.

Unless you want to do your rinsing in cold water, then using a dishwasher to both wash and rinse is probably more efficient. Modern dishwashers have eco cycles that take several hours and use much less energy for drying, so are probably arguably better than doing it by hand. They're almost certainly more water efficient, if not energy efficient.

Re: Steves Failure

I'm pretty sure that in some organisations, that would be seen as insubordination. Organisations, such as military ones...

If you've had a "don't ask why" behaviour drilled into you, then you can hardly be blamed for not asking questions.

There are good reasons, as well, for training people in the military to not question orders. Sometimes the orders coming from the top might not make sense to those carrying them out, and it's not that person's place to insert themselves into the decision-making process.Of course, successful military units also allow for a certain amount of thinking-on-your-feet, as opposed to a rigid decision-making structure (cf the current conflict in Ukraine where Russia's inflexibility is an obvious weakness), but even then, it's down to the military commander to instruct his troops to do that.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

I always forget that speakers of other variants of English don't have understatement as a rhetorical device.

Re: Ouch

I've just bought a roll of chicken wire to bury just under the surface of the compost in the plants in containers outside. It's not just cats here, but also foxes, which for some reason seem to like to bury rotten eggs like some sort of crazed alternative to the Easter Bunny.

If you don't have chicken wire, short lengths of garden cane cut at an angle and stuck vertically into the soil discourage digging animals quite effectively.

UK PM splits govt department in 4, creates dedicated 'Science and Tech' bit

Re: Department of STI

There's probably several full time jobs there, for body panel and re-spray specialists.

See, at least one person got your reference (to the car my 75 year-old mother drives, honest! It's a white one, too, well it would be if you washed the mud off it for five minutes.)

Re: Prediction - More Of The Same

Not by me, he isn't. It's worth pointing out, as well, that those false names were used to tout get-rich-quick schemes on the internet, and BAM! There's your IT angle.

Re: A Strategy? A Policy? A Plan?

Where we can, and should, invest, is in high-tech green technologies. Processes, materials, manufacturing (which we're already quite good at for things like wind turbine blades which have a fair cross-over with the aerospace industry). Of course, things like brexit put a big old brake on the export market for those products, and brain-drain on the expertise we could otherwise easily draw on from mainland Europe. The problem really is that we have politicians who like big policy announcements, and like to give puffed-up speeches about "Great British" this-and-that, but can't be bothered to do any of the actual hard thinking that sustainable policy requires.They get more electoral success by moving onto the next sack-full of bluster and empty promises. The short-term election cycle exacerbates this, but fixing that problem is NP-hard.

Re: A Strategy? A Policy? A Plan?

The problem with chip fabs, is that the sort of chemistry involved in high-purity silicon manufacturing is either very expensive or very dirty. You can't compete with the US and Far East on "expensive" and can't compete with China on "dirty", so we'd end up with the worst of both worlds: overpriced chips nobody will buy unless there is no other supply, and lots of nasty pollution.

Re: You're all missing the point here!

Don't forget those juicy ministerial pensions that they'll qualify for, even if they're in the post for just one day.

Sounds to me like a way of avoiding "targets"

I mean, you can't say whether the government has delivered on its promises* if it changes what it's measuring half-way through. If you constantly change all the departments and projects around, nobody can demonstrate that they are getting nothing done.

It's an old trick, like the time they changed the way they measure child poverty year-on-year, so nobody could say for definite how many children are going hungry and point out the government's poor record.

*You can, the answer is always "no"

Transmission FOSS BitTorrent client hits version 4.0

Nobody will ever revoke your right to play a physical disk sitting on a shelf.

Well... Yes and no...

"Region locking" means that DVDs bought in one country may not play in another, unless your player is "multi region". Some DVD players allow "region switching", but then only a fixed number of times before it sticks to one region. Woe betide anyone who switches region too often to play that Japanese import of My Neighbour Totoro and then finds their DVD player will only play Japanese DVDs.

And this sort of bullshit was baked into the very design of DVDs by the consortium of big studios that came up with them.

edit - bad example, it turns out Japan is in the same "region" as the UK (region 2). Substitute for Hong-Kong import of Enter the Dragon, rinse, and repeat.

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

Re: Hey, You!

Well, I can confidently predict that none of the current government have the wit or wherewithal to get off before it's way too late*. Of course, it'll be our money, out of general taxation, that pays for the think-tanks and implementation boards, and for any pilot programme if it ever takes place before failing abjectly.

Meanwhile, in the real world, "digitalisation" is driven by identifiable needs, benefits, and written use-cases.

*This is easily demonstrated by pointing out that they were all pretty much hand-selected at the last election under two criteria: a slavish loyalty towards Boris Johnson, and an unerring belief in the brexit unicorn, both of which are things that have demonstrably contributed to the current execrable state of this country and its economy.

Funny that information that COVID can live on plastic for days was suppressed.

You spelt "made up" wrong.

Re: The real problem with a blockchain

This ledger entry says... "Procurement, £6.3Bn"

Does that tell you anything?

Re: The real problem with a blockchain

Technically, that's "Proof of Work", the whole "Proof of Stake" thing is designed to not require "mining", but has its own issues with fairness (the rich get richer) instead.

Re: But why is this necessary?

I think the difference is that, when "created" by banks, the money is balanced by debt in a double-entry (oo-er missus, etc. etc.) ledger. That debt theoretically exists and in theory becomes due at some point (but is "paid" by "selling" it on)

When created by a central bank, it is a number that is generated from thin-air ("quantitative easing") and usually ends up in the exchequer, and thus drives inflation, because it devalues all the other currency by a tiny amount each time you do it.

Hey, You!

Look over here!

Yes, you, look at us jumping on this "digital currency" bandwagon!

No, stop looking over there at the crumbling infrastructure, massive wealth inequality, kleptocracy, widespread corruption, and ubiquitous strike action.

Re: Digital Cash..

Irony defiict detected.

Private company set up to oversee UK's prototype fusion reactor

I also doubt that many of the construction workers at Hinckley C are working in an office block. They might have a portacabin to eat their packed lunch in when it's raining. They will be on contributory pensions (probably with a matched 3% contribution), and you don't need much IT infrastructure to our concrete. I don't know where you're getting £60k from, either. The average salary for a construction worker in the UK is apparently £47.5k, and I would suspect that this is the median and not the mean, and many of the workers at Hinckley are on way less than that.

Note: the project is of comparable scale, not the anticipated results.

In other words, they expect to spend as much on the project planning (which is all this is) as on the project planning for Hinckley C, the UK's largest building site.

That's a lot of money for a bunch of project managers somewhere. I wonder how much of it they'll donate back to the Tory party?

Re: Wow this lot really love thier neoliberal economics

Don't forget 3) "make it illegal for it to complain."

To be fair, I doubt many of the construction staff at Hinkley C are on £100k salaries.

Wow this lot really love thier neoliberal economics

Let's all privatise things that don't even exist yet!

All aboard the gravy train, get your snout into that barrel, boys!

Surprise! China's top Android phones collect way more info

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

If it's a preinstalled "system" app and not baked into the firmware, you can often use adb to remove it, even when the phone says you can't.

Of course, adb isn't the easiest thing to do, and requires putting your phone into "developer mode" first, which itself is hidden away somewhere stupid (IIRC, find the system info in settings and tap on the software version ten times, or something like that), and then tethering your phone to a PC (probably works on OSes other than Windows too) and going all command-line-warrior on it.

This is often useful if your phone is bought through a carrier and they have spewed their crapware all over it. Vodafone used to be a serious culprit of this, I wouldn't know any more, since it's cheaper to buy a phone outright than pay a mortgage on it for 18 or 24 months.

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

To add further context to that post which seems to have garnered an angry down-vote from a disc-i-ple...

Unless Apple have very recently changed their manufacturing chain, iDevices are assembled by Foxconn, who are based in... (checks notes)... amongst other places, China.

Yes, a lot of silicon is manufactured by TSMC, and, depending on your political affiliation, Taiwan either is or is not part of China / an autonomous Chinese region / separate from China.

Many western countries are getting increasingly nervous about reliance on TSMC, given the Chinese government's rather antagonistic stance in the region, and are aiming to ramp up domestic chip production, but don't underestimate the scale of that problem if China decide to annex Taiwan.

Re: Chatty

Probably in different ways, and in ways on which the domestic press are not allowed to report.

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

Don't buy Chinese stuff. Buy Samsung or Apple.

With chips made in... (look it up yourself)

If you can't assure yourself you know everything about the supply chain of every piece of silicon in your device (and it's almost certainly impossible to do so), you can't be sure that none of those contain "undocumented features".

I don't think that's even especially paranoid when talking about Chinese-made chips, in particular if they are ones that are specifically bound for installation in sensitive places.

I don't think it only applies to China, either, for that matter.

Trust, and trustworthiness, are complex subjects.

Re: As an owner of a Xiaomi

If I'm reading the article correctly, I think this only applies to phones with Chinese firmware, in which case, this is almost certainly independent of the phone manufacturer, and enforced by the Chinese government.

You might have some luck flashing a different firmware onto your phone if it does have the Chinese version installed, but, caveat emptor, other firmware versions might not be compatible with the specific hardware revision of your phone, and I don't know how easy Xiaomi make it to re-flash the firmware (as an ex-HTC user, I know they used to make rooting the phone easy, but it's just a shame their hardware build quality got so lousy in their later phones).

UK health minister confirms data platform worth £480m will replicate Palantir dashboards

...I'll just add that the very name Palantír refers to the "seeing stones" from LotR (and the Silmarillion), where they were not only considered unreliable (requiring a force of will to show the truth, and then only selectively), but were also fatally corrupted and compromised by Sauron.

The choice of this name for his company seems to imply that Thiel thinks the fictional kingdom of evil, Mordor, is a good thing, and would like to emulate it.

Ohh, yes please! I really want all my healthcare data squirrelled off in the US with its zero data protections and under the control of a spyware company run by someone as well balanced and not RWNJ as Peter Thiel.

Not.

Re: WEF

Do you need a "pedo guy" to come rescue you?

Re: A cynic writes...

Don't forget the 14 different domains that you'll need to approve in NoScript in order for the page to load, and the six unnecessary ones, three of which are trackers. No, I don't know what dfg8shr76sd8h7t.cloudflare.com is either.

Re: Ah, Palantir will obviously display their platform...

Careful when you go to look for it, the light is out, and the stairs might be missing... and don't forget to bring your towel!

Re: WEF

On the plus side, he put "WEF" in the title, so we could spot that it was conspiracy theory nonsense without having to read the content.

Cat saves 'good bots' from Twitter API purge

Re: Fake bot accounts?

I think it's one of these

Re: Daemons?

Musk would somehow try to make sure you pay a microtransaction to follow it.

It’s zero-dimensional chess, and Twitler still doesn't get the point.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Re: Tearing off a strip...

Dot matrix? Pah! My dad used to have a daisywheel printer. He had it in the front room of the house we grew up in, and we could hear it going from the bottom of the back garden, which went back quite a way...

Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet

Re: Criminally liable but not civilly?

I think they were foolish enough to buy shares based on this tweet, in the expectation that the price would go up, and then it fell because the tweet was a load of old bollocks.

A bit like someone being silly enough to buy "penny stocks" on the recommendation of one of those stock scam spam emails, but without actually being encouraged to do so.

"Who's more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?"

Generative AI is out of control: Nothing, Forever is a Seinfeld spoof about nothing... forever

The neurons of the human brain have impressive plasticity and are constantly changing, and, vitally, are constantly integrating new data from a surprisingly large number of inputs (we have far more than five senses, including things like proprioception)

Re: Generative AI is out of control

So then, aMfM, when are you being upgraded to run on ChatGPT?

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Wow, look, some drivel from someone who can't even spell his baseless accusations correctly.

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

I mean, yes, Bill Gates was a ruthless fucker for much of the early life of Microsoft, but to be fair to him, he has a lot more business acumen than Musk appears to.

Re: 500 requests a month for $150

Of course Musk wants to make it expensive to search "tweets". The only "USP" that Twitter has, is its curation algorithm (which he now controls). If you want to choose what you see, rather than accept what the algorithm, under his control, decides you should see, you can damn well pay for it!

I wouldn't go near Twitter now (and barely did before), but anecdotally, a lot of people who do use it have started seeing people they "follow" disappear, and have also started seeing all the shite from Musk himself even though they have never asked to.

It stands to reason that if Musk can control what you see, he can control what you are thinking about, and it's not even paranoid to point out that that is one step away from controlling what you are actually thinking.

Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU

Re: "our energy costs will obviously fall rapidly"

It's c) extremely greedy and open to inducements

200MP smartphone and first premium PC spearhead Samsung's pro push

Re: 200 megapixels?

Oh no, looks like I got down-voted by someone who probably thinks they are an "influencer" (but who couldn't manager to post a rebuttal)

How will I live with myself?