* Posts by Martin

1436 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008

Page:

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

Martin
Happy

Re: Don't train just one skill

And you probably had more fun in that one hour per month than you did in the rest of your job!

Martin
Happy

I think perhaps the offshore coding teams might be in danger from AI (though I'm not holding my breath) - but the people who supply the specs and did the design for them will still need jobs.

And there are plenty of "coding" jobs in this country which also involve a bit more than just being a code monkey. But you've still got to know how to code.

So ignore this doomsayer from Nvidia. Go forth, young person, and learn to code. Despite the comment above, there are still plenty of jobs in tech, and still not enough people to do them.

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Martin

With Kent Walton commentating on the wrestling.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Martin
Happy

Re: I see what you did there!!!

It's not entirely clear to me either. But possibly a reference to Edmund Hillary, who was famous for climbing a snow-covered hill?

The only other famous Edmund I can think of is the one in the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and I can't make that fit :)

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Martin
Happy

Re: "Actually, this is precisely the service you paid for"

I've found that telling managers that they are wrong is a career-limiting move, even when they are wrong.

It may well be a job-limiting move. But it looks good at the next interview when you're asked that question "How did you deal with a difficult situation?"

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Martin
Unhappy

Re: Every single time

And you're also well aware that you might even be the reason for the problem this time.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Martin
Happy

A definitive answer, agreed by everyone, to the vi vs emacs debate.

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Martin
Happy

Re: fingerprint works <25% of time

What's wrong with that? It's a fingerprint sensor - and it sensed a fingerprint...

Martin
Unhappy

Re: fingerprint works <25% of time

It's reliable to the point of worry on my phones.

God, I wish. The old Nexus phones with the fingerprint sensor on the back were pretty reliable, but these newer ones with the sensor on the front are rubbish.

What was wrong with the sensor on the back, anyway? What's so damn good about the sensor on the front, which means you have to use two hands to unlock the phone - one to hold it and one to poke the sensor multiple times till it says "Please enter password..."

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Martin
Happy

I literally did that half an hour ago. I'm installing a new wireless mesh at home, hence new network, so I took a photo of a list of all the old static leases to copy them to the new system. I was looking at the photo to check the data, and then when I'd finished, I clicked on the button (on the photo) labelled "Close"....

Why have just one firewall when you can fire all the walls?

Martin
Happy

Re: As soon as...

...it was pretty much an iceberg looking for a Titanic...

That is a wonderful turn of phrase - I'm nicking that! Thanks.

Martin
Happy

Re: We've all been there.

Switting on?

Martin
Happy

...we find ourselves yet again betrayed by the beginning of the working week and its requirement to spend the next five days exchanging your labour for currency...

Speak for yourself - I've retired.

(Where's the smug git icon?)

Mid-contract telco price hikes must end, Ofcom told

Martin

Mid-contract increases will not go away...

,,,until their removal is enforced by law.

You know, like mobile phone companies are no longer allowed to have roaming charges around the EU. So that means, if a citizen of the EU travels anywhere in the EU, he still pays the same for his mobile data and calls as he does at home.

And of course, so did we. But now we don't. Another Brexit benefit.

Martin
Unhappy

Re: 75 percent ... would be put off ... if they knew prices were going to rise mid-contract

My most recent contract was with iD mobile, on page 3 of the CI/CS they have a section detailing the annual price increases - it could not be clearer.

On page three of a six page document, they finally tell you about the price increase. It could not be clearer? Of course it could - and should.

How about something that says, in fairly large print, on page 1:-

The price for your contract is £14.99 per month.

This will increase every April by the RPI from the previous January plus 3.9%.

For example, if the RPI next January is 7.4%, the increase in April would be 11.3%, which would mean that your monthly payment would increase to £16.68 a month.

This is an illustration - your increased monthly payment could be more or less than that.

You know - a bit like the terms have to be CLEARLY laid out when you take out a loan.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Martin
Unhappy

Re: No corruption here.

As far as I'm aware neither ANPR or CCTV can say "We've found out you've been thinking unlicenced thoughts... No electricity or gas for you for the next 24hrs"

Yet...

US launches official probe into Cruise after pair of pedestrian accidents

Martin
Happy

Re: “M&S”

Indeed. What was I thinking? And at the end of the evening, "Pleesh take me home >hic<"

Martin
WTF?

Why not? In the end, it is likely that self-driving cars will be safer than human-driven cars. They won't get tired, distracted or drunk; they will actually improve their driving skills as time goes by, by software updates (compared to people who just get stuck in bad habits). Yes, we need to get over the initial hump of testing, testing, testing - but eventually, they'll come. And, of course, the more self-driving cars on the road, the more they can talk to each other and avoid hitting each other - they don't have to just work via what they see.

I would love to stroll out to my car, sit in it, and say "Take me to M&S, please".

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Martin

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

Or in other words - more-or-less any house over, say, fifty years old. Our hundred year old house has brick walls with no cavity. Insulation is a problem...

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Martin
Happy

Re: Could be worse, of course

That would not be a joke. That would be cruel and unusual punishment.

Martin
Unhappy

Re: "If he downloaded Hallelujah, the problems would have been much worse"

Urghh. Can't stand it. You can't rhyme "....do you?" with Hallelujah. You just can't.

Portable Large Language Models – not the iPhone 15 – are the future of the smartphone

Martin
WTF?

Personal AI can redefine the handheld experience...

Redefine the handheld experience? Come on, that's the sort of marketing bollocks I'd expect from a puff piece, not an actual article.

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

Martin
Happy

Re: MO

And politicians, CEOs, management, estate agents,etc.

As the man said - con artists.

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Martin

Re: "you have to wonder how they get home each night

Yes - but it also said in the story that they had to explain this to the boffins every time it happened. I think you're entitled to be a little exasperated when that happens.

Martin

Circle Line

It should now be called the Spiral Line.

Keir Starmer's techno-fix for the NHS: Déjà vu disaster or brave new blunder?

Martin
FAIL

Beer Korma? Really?

You may or may not have made some good points. But you completely lost my attention when you used the stupid Beer Korma joke, not once, but twice.

It's as clever and funny as New Liebour, Bliar, Camoron, and others of those ilk. It's just peurile and irritating, and it completely undermines your claim to have a reasonable argument.

Downvote administered.

Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?

Martin
Happy

Re: Top Experts

I hope they paid you for the travel time and inconvenience for returning to site.

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

Martin

There are loads of examples of companies who were market leaders, thought they had it easy, and didn't bother to adapt - and suddenly, they were playing catch-up.

One obvious one springs to mind - Kodak.

Goddard Space Flight Center's new boss swears in on holy Pale Blue Dot

Martin
Happy

If we're swearing in, then surely this is the one?

Child hit by car among videos 'captured by Tesla vehicles, shared among staff'

Martin
FAIL

Re: Human error

I don't think the important point is whether you're in public or in private. The important point is that Tesla seem to be uploading stuff from their cameras and then their staff seem to be sharing it around.

They shouldn't be uploading stuff without permission.

And even if they HAVE got permission, it shouldn't be generally accessible and shared around.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

Martin
Happy

Re: not much of a "who me" but marriage was involved

But, unfortunately, the downvotes indicate that the reputation of techies being a bunch of sad bastards with no sense of humour is not totally unfounded...

Martin
Happy

Re: Last pager I saw...

One day, many years ago, I left my pager in my car. The car was broken into and the pager and one or two other items were stolen, including an early mobile phone. I called the police and gave them a list of the items, and also told them the number to activate the pager. Two hours later, I got a call from the police. They'd apprehended some suspicious lads, and one of them was carrying a little black item.

"So what's that then?" says Mr Plod.

"Ah", says lad, "that's a pager, and it's mine."

"Oh really?" says the cop. Rings the number I'd given him and asks for a test message to be sent. Pager vibrates....

The phrase "caught bang to rights" springs to mind. Unfortunately, they had already offloaded the mobile phone and other items and denied any knowledge of them :(

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Martin
Happy

Re: The opposite problem

Oh, yes. In my days as a contractor, I managed a couple of times to get a contract direct with the company, rather than through an agent. The upside was a significantly better rate - the downside was chasing the accounts department. They just didn't seem to understand that, for a sole trader, a 90 day delay on payment of invoices was a bit of an issue.

At one company, I'd managed to get the accounts department to agree a thirty day payment schedule, which I could live with. A few months went by - and then, after five weeks, I hadn't been paid and asked the accounts team where the money was. "Oh, ninety days payment" trots out the grunt at the other end. So I spoke to my boss, who spoke to the accounts department, who promised a cheque would be raised immediately. By the Friday, it hadn't appeared. So I spoke to my (very supportive) boss again, and told him if the cheque didn't arrive on Friday, I wouldn't be coming to the office on Monday. It didn't. I didn't go into the office on Monday morning. My boss spoke to someone at accounts. I don't know what he said, but a cheque was couriered to me on the Monday afternoon.

This, btw, seems to be a UK issue. I had a friend who ran a small company with international customers, large and small. UK companies were always three months, and then you might get into the next cheque run. Far East companies paid in thirty days or less.

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Martin
Unhappy

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

Well, in my whole forty year career from small companies to large, I've never seen it happen. You can't set up new rules and backdate them; even with connivance, you still need evidence of gross misconduct.

If such a thing had happened to me, I'd have been to see an industrial lawyer PDQ. You'd at least get a significant payoff.

Martin
FAIL

Re: Well that was unfortunate.

In the UK at least, "because we want to" is not enough. You have to have not been doing your job properly, and they have got to have gone through a disciplinary procedure.

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/reasons-you-can-be-dismissed

(Of course, P&O ferries were able to dismiss all their staff and admit they were in breach of the law with absolutely no come-back.)

Techie wiped a server, nobody noticed, so a customer kept paying for six months

Martin
Happy

Indeed. I think my reaction would have been - if you haven't used it for six months, why not? You tell a little white lie - you say that no-one knew what the server was doing, as far as we were concerned it was surplus to requirements. So it was switched off for a week, and no-one shouted about it - so it was decommissioned.

To the Moon? Emojis can be financial advice, says judge

Martin
Happy

Re: I'm perpetually amazed

A little cynical, eh?

I think it's more likely that most sales transactions are where the buyer pays just a little more than he'd have liked, and the seller gets just a little less than he'd like. But generally, both sides are reasonably happy.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Martin
Unhappy

Re: "a strong desire to reduce refueling costs"

It's just a mess of charging systems at the moment in the UK, probably the same everywhere.

Indeed. I have thirteen different apps for charging my EV. THIRTEEN!!!

And that's not thirteen apps I've downloaded just in case - that thirteen apps each of which I've actually used at least once when charging on the road.

It also doesn't include the app associated with my home charger.

And I only charge on the road on holiday - I don't do a huge amount of travelling otherwise.

It is actually quite ridiculous.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Martin
Happy

Re: Don't forget mischief

My mother was once approaching a one-way street as a pedestrian, and so only looked one way before crossing. Unfortunately, a few days earlier, the road had been converted to two-way... Fortunately she walked into the side of a moving car, not in front of it. Still, it knocked her over, and she was a bit bruised. However, it transpired that she'd been knocked down by a nurse on her way to work to the local hospital, so she just got taken straight to A&E...

Low code is no replacement for software development, say German-speaking SAP users

Martin
Happy

Re: Deja vu all over again

Or even The Last One from 1981.

I've retired now, but I spent nearly forty years writing software, and I never saw any sign that it's going to be replaced with some magic that will allow end users to write software without knowing what they are doing. And I'd bet that anyone starting a new career in software this year will still have a job in twenty years time.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Martin
Happy

Re: Now ask me why ...

Many years ago, in Aviemore, I met a drunken Glaswegian eating a pie. He was incredibly friendly and chatty, but the drunkeness made it hard, and the pie made it harder. I can truthfully state that the only bit I was sure I understood was when I heard him say, laughingly, "Ah, ye canna oonderstand the dialect!"

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

Martin

Re: Daft

Thatcher gets blamed because she was the one who started the neoliberal mess we are still saddled with. Along with shutting down our manufacturing industry, and selling off all our state assets and North Sea Oil, and using the money to reduce taxes (mainly for the rich) rather than investing in our future. As a direct result, we now have the first generation of kids for YEARS who are generally worse off than their parents,

(Yes, yes, I know, she dealt with the over-strong unions too. But what a bloody cost.)

Martin
FAIL

Re: Daft

Comprehensive schools were not introduced against parent's wishes - only against the wishes of the parents of the 10% who went to grammar schools.

And the introduction (and retaining) of comprehensive schools has been demonstrated to be better overall for most kids. So, the change was evidence based - something the current government has no interest in whatsoever.

Agreed to some extent about student fees and loans. But it's not that simple either - there was a demand for more higher education as we went towards a more skills-based system (mainly due to the fact that our manufacturing base got shut down by Thatcher.)

And the "great system" we had had been massively underfunded by the Tories. You can argue as much as you like about some of the things that Labour did, but they DID significatly increase spending on education, and for those few years, building were repaired, new schools were built, teachers were well paid and schools had reasonably sized classes.

And finally - Blair sent his kids to a state school. The London Oratory is a state Catholic school. Get your facts right.

Minecraft's 'first luxury goods collection' features real-world $3,000 Burberry coat

Martin
Happy

You exaggerate. The t-shirt is only $570. That's $20 for the t-shirt and $550 for the word "Burberry" in a naff font on the front. A bargain - I'm getting two.

No, I will not pay the bill. Why? Because we pay you to fix things, not break them

Martin

Re: I have a problem..

Yes - I used to be rated on an international team (UK and US) against my peers.

So we'd get things like:-

Did such-and-such do a good job on that project?

UK answer. "Yes, very good job - 8/10"

US answer. "Hell, yeah! 10/10!"

And of course, you tend to know the people better in your own part of the world. And as a result, the US guys tended to get more of the promotions than the UK guys...

Martin
Happy

Re: It goes far beyond that ...

Or Bacchus. There's a reason for the word bacchanalian.

Martin
Joke

Re: It goes far beyond that ...

Did you hear about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa?

(For some reason, when I first heard that, it really tickled me...)

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Martin
Happy

Re: Bad design

Unless you've never driven a car that has a "Start" button instead of a keyhole.

Actually, my E-type had a keyhole for the ignition key, and also a "Start" button to turn the engine over to start it.

It's not that interesting, but I just wanted an excuse to mention that I once owned an E-type.

Those screws on the Apple Watch Ultra are a red herring

Martin
Happy

Hear hear. I HATE those rare days that I forget to put my watch on. You feel such a pillock looking at a blank wrist to find out the time.

And my watch was my 40th birthday present from my wife - it's nice to be reminded of that every time I want to know the time.

Martin
Happy

There's no good reason a smartwatch can't last as long as a regular watch, with normal servicing.

But then how do I show my friends a brand new shiny-shiny every couple of years?

Page: