Posts by Robin 596 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Feb 2007
Why would you blame the cleaners? Could they actually see what was happening as they lower that contraption? It hadn't happened before, had it?
Indeed. Some people are just angry and need an outlet for it. As confirmed by...
"But the cleaners found out I can swear fluently in three languages,"
So he's been swearing and they haven't understood, so he's kept going until he found a language they understood.
That mess left Nathan with another problem: who to blame?
I've worked in places where the focus is "who's fault is this" rather than "what can we improve for next time" and it wasn't pleasant.
Exactly. At this point it's a dick-waving exercise for the mobile companies in order to sell contracts on new handsets.
It kind of felt like we were getting somewhere with 4G, where if they'd kept improving things it would have been good. e.g. I was on a moving train in Germany and did a speed test, which showed 100 meg. But then bam, along comes 5G and now a lot of the time my phone flicks between 5G and EDGE. At this point EDGE = No Signal and as mentioned elsewhere there have been plenty of occasions where I have full 5G signal yet nothing loads. I've seen 950 meg speeds over 5G which is great, but if 90% of the time it's just shit then what's the point?
It is, but my "Friday workflow" for El Reg was to look at the home page for interesting articles and Cmd+Click them into new tabs, as well as looking for the "On Call" tag and clicking that into a new tab as well. Then read and close them one by one.
This new On Call category is all well and good and is "only a click" but there are so many UIs which have recently changed to add things behind "only a click", it's frustrating.
One place I worked, we always had what we christened "the 4pm emergency". Every day, someone elsewhere in the business would find something that of course absolutely had to be solved there and then. Half the time it wasn't even a tech problem.
This reminded me of the BBC Master Compact and I couldn't resist a good scratch of the nostalgia itch reading about it.
I wonder if this is part of the broader argument along the lines of "I don't have kids so why should I pay for schools?" Some people's view that they should only pay for exactly what they use is so entrenched that it's difficult to even have that conversation. The schools argument you can kind of see, but what about fire? Police? Street lights? Where does it end?
Over the weekend I saw a discussion about a glimpse into what a post-licence fee world would look like, in the form of adverts running during the Six Nations rugby coverage on ITV (as in, during the actual period of play). It's not hard to imagine that getting worse, without ad-free coverage from the BBC to compare against.
I do believe there should be some kind of national broadcaster in each country, but I also agree the system isn't perfect like it is.
The change to abusive advertising happened back in around 2000/2001. Ads before that were static images or maybe animated gifs at a push. They sat there in the top right corner or down the left hand side, and that was it. Then came the popups. And ones that expanded to fill the screen. And popunders. That was the point at which the advertisers made their collective bed, and why today they can go and fucking lie in it.
The advertising manager in the company where I worked was quite dismissive when we warned him that ad blockers were a thing and would get more popular. 6 months later he was begging us to find ways around the blockers and so the war was on. And yes I washed my hands with wire wool and bleach every evening.
I just tried your query against ChatGPT to make an image of a chess opening board, it's hilarious. It's 8x7, with squares labelled A-H across the bottom but on the left and right sides it's got numbers 5,2,4,5,6,7 and blank. The pieces look weird, like the knights are mixed with rooks. And it seems like white has 2 queens whilst black has 2 kings.
One team I was in charge of used to get pestered by the "can't be arsed" type of people you describe.
So I implemented an unofficial rule whereby the team would wait an hour before replying to any query which was obviously of that nature. During that hour, most of the people would realise that actually they did know how to do the thing themselves after all, leaving us to concentrate on the work which did genuinely need our help.
Thus our efficiency improved as a result. I would like to say it also educated the "can't be arsed" people, but it's more like it forced them into doing stuff they should have already been doing anyway.
As a Welshman I feel culturally misappropriated that they use the name Cariad for this data slurping and leaking. Still, at least the wooden spoon is going to the right place /s
Although my first programming steps were on the BBC Micro, the Gorillas.bas era was when I truly got the taste for hacking away at some code to achieve some feature like making the banana explosions bigger, and then fixing it when I broke it. Happy days!
You can relive the experience here:
https://playclassic.games/games/action-dos-games-online/qbasic-gorillas/
> Dubbed GameNGen, pronounced "game engine,"
If you have to tell people how to pronounce the name, you should probably have thought of a different name. Although I guess that guidance is because "NGen" sounds nothing like "engine" with UK pronunciation? (At least to my inner voice)
But...... if you have it printed on .... paper...... you'd still be able to read it. You know, that flat stuff pounded from trees that goes back before grandad soiled his first nappy.
That's a useful definition of what paper is, thanks.
Not having things on paper until it's too late is easily done. The 22-year old version of me for example, when handing in my completed dissertation, didn't consider it worthy spending another £X on printing it out, when there was beer to drink and shopping to buy. Sad but true. I would probably have justified it to myself using the excuse that I had it on 3.5" disk anyway, so could do it another time. That other time never came and there it still sits, on the disk. So I completely sympathise with the "stuck on 9-track tape" commenter above.
We got given the thumbs up to play Unreal Tournament at lunchtime, which was great. Although I often wondered what non-IT employees thought when they walked past our department at lunchtimes to see us all staring intently at our screens in silence, only for one of us to suddenly exclaim "you bastard!" after being shot by a camped sniper.
I'm all for PR, but it has to be done right and supported.
They tried[1] this with "Alternative Vote" referendum in 2011. As I recall, the benefits of an alternative to FPTP were not well promoted at all, and voter turnout was pretty low so we just ended up with the same system. In fact in the intervening years it's cropped up in conversation now and again, and several people didn't even know it happened.
[1] I say they tried; it was massively in their interests for it not to change.
