Posts by Robin

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

I'm looking forward to when they retrify the 6310

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: pet peeve

> "Login" is the noun for the user's account, "log in" the verb.

I once pointed out a typo on the customer-facing website along these lines, and it was dismissed on the basis that "login" as a verb is used so widely that it's accepted parlance. *sigh

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

"I don't like the name GIMP. Will you change it?"

I find the name "Visual Studio Code" offensive because it's sight-ist and I want it changed.

Won't somebody think of the glasses wearers!

Humans may be able to live on Mars within halls of aerogel – a wonder material that can trap heat and block radiation

Re: Why not test it on earth?

"Why not test it on earth?"

No, I'm pretty sure that they're going to make a plan to use it on Mars without having tested it at all.

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Long time running

"The first program ran on 1 May 1964."

...and is presumably still running, because the second line was GOTO 10 ?

Greatest threat facing IT? Not the latest tech giant cockwomblery – it's just tired engineers

Re: Estimating Software Projects

"My general rule of thumb was to multiply my estimate by 4 to get a believable number and then multiply by 4 again."

When calculating an estimate, I was advised by my first manager I ever had to think how long it would probably take, then double the number and increase the time unit by one (e.g. 2 days becomes 4 weeks)

At the time, I thought he was joking...

Microsoft's corporate veep for enterprise puts the boot into boot times

Re: "we put our lie detector on her and gave her a test"

They'd need to attach 3 or 4 of them behind a load balancer, to deal with the high demand.

UK tech has a month left to bare gender pay gaps, but less than a fifth of firms have ponied up

> Are we not tired of this radical left wing feminist nonsense yet?

Yep.

Re: This is the "pay gap" that ignores the job title right?

There were a couple of Guardian articles about it on Friday.

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Landing

That main stage landing still amazes me. It's been travelling at over 6000km/h and it can land itself on a boat within a couple of metres of its target.

Nice work!

OK, team, we've got the big demo tomorrow and we're feeling confident. Let's reboot the servers

Another Robin in the 'Hood

When I saw the submitter's name I panicked for a split second and wondered if I'd previously submitted a story whilst N-sheets to the wind :-)

There's no 'My' in Office, Microsoft insists with new productivity hub

Re: No 'My' in Office?

If I could travel back in time, one of the things I would do is have a 'quiet word' with whoever came up with the idea of prefixing everything with "My..." back in Windows 95.

It's responsible for endless lazy variable names too.

Then I'd move on to whoever had the bright idea of calling both the browser and the file viewer "Explorer".

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

Skype is also 'Free'

Skype is also 'free', but they still managed to screw it up.

Wait until they start the whole 'GitHub for Business' thing.

Apple co-founder and former CEO has the most expensive John Hancock on the planet

Loved that film.

"A pint? That's very nearly an armful!"

Genius.

Astroboffins spot one of the oldest, coolest stars in the universe lurking in the Milky Way

"Earth is the only planet with chocolate or coffee"

...that we're aware of.

Google unwraps its gateway drug: Edge TPU chips for IoT AI code

Re: Is that so?

"or reports to Google that I burnt the whole wheat again."

Or in my case, the whole house. Must stop making toast after a few jars!

I predict a riot: Amazon UK chief foresees 'civil unrest' for no-deal Brexit

Re: eh?

"As a 67 year old with a functioning brain, I'd just like to add that not ALL over-60 voted leave!"

Here... have your 67th thumbs up :-)

'Fibre broadband' should mean glass wires poking into your router, reckons Brit survey

Fibra

I have FTTP (300 meg, soon to be 600) here in Spain.

When I originally asked the company (Movistar) to install it, I asked the shop assistant if it would be all the way to my house and he looked at me like I was thick.

Farewell then, Slack: The grown-ups have arrived

Re: Its the integrations stoopid

I used it in the last place I worked and yes I agree, the integrations for e.g. Jira, Git and Hubot were pretty useful.

In the same conversation group where a particular subset of people are discussing a feature of a project, you can get quick updates on Jira tickets, issue Hubot commands and see the responses, all out in the open so everybody knows what's going on. We used to do deployments and all sorts this way.

People here suggesting it's a poor replacement for email have never used it properly, or at all.

Drug cops stopped techie's upgrade to question him for hours. About everything

Work Experience

This isn't something that stopped me doing my work as such, but it was my first encounter with that level of security.

I was lucky enough to get to do my pre-GCSE work experience week in a military facility.

On the Monday morning my Dad dropped me off just down the road from the main gates on his way to work. The 14-year old version of me was still enthusiastic and ready to experience the world of work, because at that point I hadn't had my soul crushed into an uncaring pulp. I merrily walked up to the gate and was confronted by the guard, with huge machine gun in hand. After changing my underpants I managed to nervously blurt out why I was there and he called the relevant person to come and meet me, and I began my week.

By the time the end of my week came around, I was greeting the same tooled-up guard with a cheery "morning mate!" and he even shook my hand when I left. Good times!

Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work

Re: Had a close call

"Call from developers based in USA to UK at (of course) about 16:00 on Friday."

Ah the good old 4pm emergency. It's why I started working 10am-6pm shifts. I get a lie-in in the mornings and my 8am-4pm colleagues get to go home on time, while I spend 15 minutes finding out that's it usually not an emergency after all.

You're in charge of change, and now you need to talk about DevOps hater Robin

Robinists

Why am I getting it in the neck all of a sudden?

Publishers tell Google: We're not your consent lackeys

Re: I am Shocked I Tell You.......

I've heard the view is fantastic in Silicone Valley.

Can't login to Skype? You're not alone. Chat app's been a bit crap for five days now

Re: Skype has been crap since May 2011

"The reverse Midas touch of Microsoft."

The Sadim touch.

Perv raided college girls' online accounts for nude snaps – by cracking their security questions

Re: Everytime I see "Mother's maiden name" on the list of security question...

Some security questions are terrible.

On the phone, HSBC ask for your sort code and account number first off. Then as one of the security questions, they ask you to confirm which branch the account is held in. You know, that publicly-searchable sort code lookup information?

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

"too US-focussed ... and often times ..."

Irony alert :-)

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

I'd just purchased about 100MB of ram for about $40/Mb

3 days later the company I'd bought it off phoned up and offered 3 times what I'd paid them for it.

When was this? 4 grand for 100 meg seems crazy these days!

FBI says it can't unlock 8,000 encrypted devices, demands backdoors for America's 'public safety'

Re: Holy Trinity..

I count 4 excuses, what is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

Have you not heard of the Holy Quaternity? The father, the son, the holy ghost and the holy son's mate Ian.

How to make your HTML apps suck less, actually make some money

I've wondered about app download sizes before. For example, Facebook's last iOS update was about 200 meg if I remember rightly. Seeing as it's all online content, WTF is in there to make it that big?

I realise the answer is probably 'all the spyware' but it would be interesting to know what goes in there.

Hate to break it to you, but billions of people can see Uranus tonight

Re: "Which Zodiac sign is it in?"

and can just about recognise the moon.

Once you've got that skill nailed, you can work on distinguishing it from Empire space stations.

Release the KRACKen patches: The good, the bad, and the ugly on this WPA2 Wi-Fi drama

Rest assured if you ever see a post by an AC that is so absurd, ridiculous or just plain stupid to the power of 10 then it's a joke.

Also, one that's clearly a joke (given the target audience) is probably a joke too.

Sniffing substations will solve 'leccy car charging woes, reckons upstart

Re: Access to the Open LV dataset...

Ohm my god, these puns are terrible.

Google touts Babel Fish-esque in-ear real-time translators. And the usual computer stuff

Balance

In the interests of balance, shouldn't there be some "100 quid for a pen??" comments like Apple got when they released their pencil?

Commodore 64 makes a half-sized comeback

During the trend of moving to 'soft' type keyboards in the early 2000s, I kept my old style IBM clicky one as it was much nicer to type on.

The downside was that whenever the office was quiet, everyone could tell when I was typing. Not so great for the Friday afternoon skive!

Want to keep in contact with friends and family without having to sell your personal data?

Get Out of the Way of My Lawn

It actually looks and feels like the kind of space-age 21st-century that was enthusiastically shown to families in the 1970s, along with the self-cleaning laundry basket, automatic lawn mover, robot butler and flying car.

I'm fed up of having to move my lawn myself* all the time, I can't wait until it does it itself!

* I say myself, my robot monkey butler actually does it.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Re: These "new" iPhones

Bezel-less screens, wireless charging and on screen home buttons. Wow, that's so innovative - where do they get their ideas from?

To be fair, during the presentation they didn't claim to be first with any of those things (even though the X doesn't have an on-screen home button).

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: That'll confuse users

The first rule of Robot Club is "You do not talk about Robot Club"

The second rule of Robot Club is "You DO NOT talk about Robot Club"

Oh no sorry, the second rule is "No smoking"

Microsoft breaks Office 365 sign-in pages ahead of surprise update

Paginated

In addition to some basic UI tweaks, the updated design comes with a paginated sign-in where you enter your username on the first page and a credential (password, probably) on the second.

"We've done a lot of testing of this design and our telemetry shows that people are able to sign in with a notably higher success rate using this approach," Microsoft notes.

Wait, so it's: type username ... wait for page to reload ... type password?

I don't get how that would yield such a supposed improvement in sign-in success?

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

"Hell, I'm not even sure if I can trust the average browser to display web pages any more ..."

Or to have consistent dev tools. The Chrome people in particular seem to enjoy fucking about with the dev tools on a regular basis, either moving or 'improving' things.

Moneysupermarket fined £80,000 for spamming seven million customers

"I'm almost certain I always opt out of these things, but I'm never sure as I've no receipt to confirm it or not"

Plus the opt-out text can be misleading. "Don't not untick this if you sometimes don't fancy receiving nothing..."

Train station's giant screens showed web smut at peak hour

Re: Rather good.

And the "Fat Controller" is an S&M reference, right?

Well they do live on the island of Sodomor.

Drugs, vodka, Volvo: The Scandinavian answer to Britain's future new border

Re: Who is going to pay for all this?

Mexico will, of course.

Bot you see is what you get: The cold reality of Microsoft's chat 'AI'

"That's very interesting Baldrickk! Tell me more about ##"

NASA to fire 1Gbps laser 'Wi-Fi' ... into spaaaaace

"NASA does know that the ISS spins around the earth and isn't in line of sight all the time?"

You should get in touch with them ASAP, they probably hadn't thought of that.

Carnegie-Mellon Uni emits 'don't be stupid' list for C++ developers

Rules

Well I've read through the rules, but Rule 34 seems to be missing?

Also, the first Rule of C++ Club seems to be wrong.

Sysadmin's sole client was his wife – and she queried his bill

300 Quid

Where I live, a tubo of cerveza (about 300ml) is 1.20€ so with £300-worth in the bar I'm sure he had a great afternoon!

Vinyl, filofaxes – why not us too, pleads Nokia

re: Imagine if...

Imagine if there was an iPhone or Andoid phone that was HALF as rugged and had HALF as much battery life as these ancient Nokias.

While Timmy and Jony continue being obsessed with thinness, that's never going to happen to the iPhone.

I wonder if anyone ever thinks, "You know what I hate about this iPhone I have? It's so fucking THICK."

Meanwhile, the one device that would actually benefit from being thinner is the Watch, yet the focus is on the ability to put a new strap on it.

Forget quantum and AI security hype, just write bug-free code, dammit

Expo Photo

Was that picture taken on the way to the JPEG Compression Artifact Conference 2017? :-D

Cattle that fail, not pets that purr – the future of servers

What Goes Around

"In the 1990s, it was commonplace for the single IT guy to name their servers after planets, or even characters of a TV show."

I still do that. And there's no need to rub in the fact that I'm single, ok?

Seduced by the Docker side: Microsoft's support could be first shot fired in the Container Wars

Re: Hilarious

I understood that to be in the context of open source, as per the previous sentence.