Posts by Ian Johnston 2622 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007
It's that sort of thing that reminds you why legislation is brought in to prevent DIY electrical work.
When I bought a house a couple of years ago I had the electrics checked. It turned out that two double 13A sockets in the sitting room were being fed via a 0.5mm^2 flex taken as a spur off the cellar lighting circuit. That arrangement was the work of professionals and had been signed off by professionals when, before I bought it, the house was let out.
Mainly things which relied on Python 2 which are now missing or broken, but the increasing reliance on snaps ("Hey! Let's use up much more disk space with stuff which doesn't update automatically even if the developer remembers to check for and include updated version of every single dependency! Say goodbye to troubling consistence and security!") is a pisser too.
The killer for me - for which I don't particularly blame Ubuntu - is that the Citrix NetScaler Gateway VPN client won't run on it.
He invented new, cheaper and better ways of creating things that were already possible by doing the impossible so the rest of us could afford to own them.
Not really. He invented new, cheaper and worse ways of doing things, throughout his career. That scientific calculator could be 30% out in trigonometric functions ...
If you fix the ship's position by taking, say, three bearings from shore landmarks, there will always be an error introduced by the time it takes to physically convey the bearing from the gyro-compass to the chart.
Very simple to allow for that. You can even use it to good advantage: it's the basis of a "running fix", a standard part of the navigator's repertoire. Perhaps the officer quoted is the one whose superior skills put HMS Astute on a rock?
Are you saying that a data controller is obliged to retain personal data in perpetuity unless the subject agrees that it can be deleted?
Every year we have a data clear-out day at work, when we are all asked to review any personal data we hold and delete anything we no longer need. Should we really be asking the data subjects for permission to do so?
I was then, and I agree with everything you say. Which is tangential to my point, which is that if Sinclair hadn't done it, someone else would. His computers are viewed with affection not because they were the best game in town but because they were the only game in town, which is why when half decent systems like the BBC Micro came out, Sinclair sank fast and without trace.
It's a bit like those early Amstrad IBM compatibles - from the PC512SD to the PC640DD. They were rubbish, but they dominated the market for a couple of years because they were half the price of anything else.
You miss my point completely. Yes, Sinclair brought cheap (and crappy) computers to the masses, but if he hadn't done it someone else would, and these threads would be full of people saying "I would never have got interested in IT if it hadn't been for my Oric Atmos / Dragon 32 / Commodore PET / BBC Micro Insert-any-one-of-many-others-here.
Clive Sinclair, to use your analogy, turned computers form complicated unreliable playthings of the wealthy to complicated, unreliable playthings of the masses.
Lots of survivor bias here. Sure, plenty of British IT people had their first programming experiences with Sinclair kit, just as most state educated professional sin the 60s went to grammar schools and most people who survived 18th century medical care were treated with leeches. That doesn't actually make Spectrums, grammar schools or leeches good things, because it ignore all the people who were put off, discarded or killed.
Would there have been more programmers if Sinclair's product hadn't been so awful? Possibly not, but it's worth considering.
It all reminds me of that time Tony Blair sent tanks to Heathrow, claiming that there was good evidence that terrorists had a surface-to-air missile and were preparing to use it. Curiously enough it happened on the day when he was trying to get one of his wars through the commons. What a remarkable coincidence. And we've never heard anything about the missile since.
I use A&A in two places and am very happy with them I was able to port two phone numbers to their VOIP service, but I understand that some cannot be ported. Unlike BT, A&A pointed out that when fibre reached my house there was no need to pay line rental for a copper phone line if I went VOIP; as a result my combined data+phone bill is generally about £15/month less than it was with the phone Co-Op.
One minor oddity. My house is FTTP with a 1Gbps connection of which I pay for 80Mbps. The other connection I have is FTTC, also nominally 80Mbps but in practice about twice the speed and far more reliable. Maybe a big city vs countryside thing.
Also, remember One Laptop per Child?
A well deserved flop, mainly because it was conceived by a bunch of techies with bizarre idea abut how education should happen. Their insistence, for example, that children sitting round a table should be forced to collaborate on line rather than talking to each other.
Morals: (1) Even bright people can be hopelessly wrong when they stray from their field - thank you, Professors Laithwaite and Fleischmann (2) Don't listen to Nicholas Negroponte.
Same in Scotland. See also: "Cool whip".
One of the problems with using synthetic phonics to teach reading here is that many/most of the schemes omit sounds essential in Scotland, like the "hwh" in "which" and the "ch" in "loch". They also tend to think that "four" and "for" sound identical, which confuses the hell out of children.
Of course a favourite ploy is to secretly damage the roof, have inadequate security on the empty property and a few years later a Council will condemn the listed building.
In Glasgow - my home town - it's traditional for interesting buildings on valuable sites to "go on fire".
The people who knows what's needed are called "users" and are traditionally the subject of contempt among FOSS developers on the grounds that either (a) "I don't want to do that so you don't want to do that" or (b) "If you don't like it you're free to modify the source as you want."
Both of which are fine, but lose you any right to complain when your application fails to make a hit or, yet again, it isn't your year on the desktop.
Quite serious. Zealotry is almost invariably off-putting and every time RMS says "That's GNU/Linux, thank you very much" or "I refuse to talk about open source software" a few more people start backing nervously away, looking for the door.
So yes, I think he has probably done more to damage the FOSS world than anyone else. Extremism is never a good look.
The courts decide on innocence or guilt in respect of an alleged offence as defined by current statute or regulation, not on whether an action constitutes an offence or not.
<coughClive Ponting<cough>
They don't make the law - that privilege ultimately rests with Parliament in the UK.
<cough>Common law<cough>
It's not just this event that's concerning. The NY article has a whole list of test flight problems (quite apart from the fatality) which Virgin Don't-Mention-The-Karman-Line dealt with firmly ... by sacking the chief test pilot. They are also grounding everything for eight months at least while they do major work to the launch plane, which suggests that it's not all quite as rosy as they like to claim. Only eleven years late to market and counting ...
unless Biden really and truly screws up, which seems increasingly possible...
Let's face it - Biden is only president because no Democrat of any ability and personality thought Trump could be beaten. We thought Trump was bad in his first term; his second, when he doesn't have to worry about re-election, is going to be terrifying.
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