Posts by Deryk Barker

Want Edward Snowden pardoned? You're in the minority, say pollsters

Re: If you only watch Faux News and CNN....

"Side Two: if we don't, terrorists will kill your children...."

Hah! Fooled them - I don't have any children.

Today's smart home devices are too dumb to succeed

I refuse

to have anything to do with any system/device that thinks it knows better than I do.

This is why I will never use any product from Apple.

Apple and Samsung are plotting to KILL OFF the SIM CARD - report

Re: What an embarrassment of knee-jerk reactions

"The Apple SIM gives you the flexibility to choose from a variety of short-term plans from select carriers in the U.S. and UK right on your iPad."

"Select carriers" is the key phrase here and your ignoring it undermines your argument.

If Apple are for it

I'm against it.

Run Windows 10 on your existing PC you say, Microsoft? Hmmm.

Re: Ha

Actually, linux hardware support is much better than windows. And older hardware is far more likely to be supported.

Even newer hardware: back in the days of Vista my college leased a whole bunch of HP laptops with it installed.

Vista would not even see a USB mouse. USB in 2008?????

Linux has had the edge over windows in terms of hardware support for several years now.

We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror

This simply reinforces the decision I made 20 years ago to jump ship to linux.

Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game

"He’s a VB programmer (be gentle, he’s only 10), which is part of the problem schools face in teaching coding; they are supposed to teaching coding before the idea of a variable has appeared in maths. "

Given that many people coming to programming from a mathematical background have considerable difficulty with the concept of variables, as they are quite different (in mathematics X = X + 1 is meaningless for example) I'm not totally convinced this is such a big deal.

However, primary teachers teaching coding worries me...

Canuck chump cuffed over helium balloon flying chair stunt

Re: Go Calgary!

You beat me to it.

Linux on the desktop is so hot there's now a fight over it

Oh yes, let's run the stable, reasonably secure OS in a virtual machine under the control of an unstable insecure OS.

No ta.

Re: Linux Desktops?

"All businesses are emailing Word and Excel docs, along with Outlook appointment notifications, between each other, on a daily basis."

But not the UK government? Or the city of Munich, or......

Apple fanbois to be empowered to bonk each other

Yes the banking system is in urgent need of reform.

However, only a complete idiot would believe that Apple is the company to do it.

Let me PLUG that up there, love. It’s perfectly standaAAARGH!

I think you'll find Flanders and Swann had this sussed half a century ago:

The Gasman Cometh:

Twas on a Monday morning

The Gas-Man came to call;

The gas tap wouldn't turn - I wasn't getting gas at all.

He tore out all the skirting boards

To try and find the main,

And I had to call a Carpenter to put them back again.

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do!

'Twas on a Tuesday morning

The Carpenter came round;

He hammered and he chiselled and he said: 'Look what I've found!

Your joists are full of dry-rot

But I'll put it all to rights.'

Then he nailed right through a cable and out went all the lights.

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do!

'Twas on a Wednesday morning

The Electrician came;

He called me 'Mr Sanderson' (which isn't quite my name).

He couldn't reach the fuse box

Without standing on the bin

And his foot went through a window - so I called a Glazier in.

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do!

Twas on a Thursday morning

The Glazier came along,

With his blow-torch and his putty and his merry Glazier's song;

He put another pane in -

It took no time at all -

But I had to get a Painter in to come and paint the wall.

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do!

'Twas on a Friday morning

The Painter made a start;

With undercoats and overcoats he painted every part,

Every nook and every cranny,

But I found when he was gone

He'd painted over the gas tap and I couldn't turn it on!

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do!

On Saturday and Sunday they do no work at all:

So 'twas on a Monday morning that the Gas-Man came to call!

Boeing 787 software bug can shut down planes' generators IN FLIGHT

Re: GCU...

James Blish?

Banks was just 8 years old when the final volume of Cities in Flight was published in 1962.

Don't assume public trusts you, MI5. 'Make a case' for surveillance – Former security chief

Re: given a choice between the three...

No I don't trust WIkipedia; knowledge is not a democracy.

Version 0.1 super-stars built the universe – and they lived all the way over there, boffins point

Re: God is bigger than the Bible

"Like morality, the subject of God's existence or lack thereof is a matter for philosophy, not science"

Seriously, you believe that?

Your servers are underwater? Chill out – liquid's cool

"Although liquid cooling is now commonplace in HPC applications, part of the reason for its slow adoption in enterprises and mainstream data centres is often put down to hydrophobia among IT managers."

I've had my problems with managers, but have yet to meet one with rabies...

Apple recalls Beats speakers: Rap chap's crap batt rapped in zap mishap flap

It's tempting

to simply say that anyone who buys audio equipment from the Beast of Cupertino is asking for it, but I won't go that far.

I will say that this simply reinforces my decision never, ever to buy anything from this company.

Aw, snap! How huge HTML links can crash Chrome tabs in one click

Chromium version 41 on linux suffers a "He's Dead Jim" crash but only in the tab involved, the browser as a whole doesn't crash.

Man sparks controversy, fined $120 for enjoying wristjob while driving

Re: "If he was using it as a watch he would have glanced at it to get the time"

Handsfree is just as distracting and dangerous, as studies have shown.

It's a pity that many jurisdictions have knuckled under the the driving lobbies and not banned these as well.

DTS announces DTS:X – sparks object-based audio war with Dolby

Re: 2 @cosymart

I doubt it. My Linn preamp has a mono switch.

Facebook's phone KILLER: Messenger will replace TALKING, says Zuck

Is Zuckerberg

the world's biggest wanker?

Sir Terry remembered: Dickens' fire, Tolkien's imagination, and the wit of Wodehouse

I've never managed to get through an entire Prachett novel - and comparing anyone to Wodehouse is simply a non-starter, DIckens too for that matter.

But I have to congratulate him on flourishing after working on the Bucks Free Press, which I remember from my early days as a completely awful rag.

And the nobility of his final years.

Ads watchdog: Er, what does woman in her undies have to do with ‘slim’ phone?

She leaves her jeans and shirt hanging over the back of the sofa?...quelle slut.

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Re: Doubly unusable if he moved the document

If Word used a *real* standard format (don't try telling me OOXML is) then these problems would, over time, vanish as other software - e.g. LibreOffice, Abiword - were able to implement import/export functions without having to reverse engineer Word format.

My wife has just been going through a similar process with her latest book (a biography of the architect Thomas Fuller, FWIW) as her editor wants .doc (or .docx!!!!!!!!). Among other problems, she has had to extract the footnotes into separate documents, because they get totally screwed up in the conversion otherwise.

I will join the original author in "publically slagging off the work of some very talented programmers who have put years of work into the software for no good reason that I can see here": my experiences with Word and the rest of Office have always been entirely negavtive.

And, you know, I imagine those "very talented programmers" (I've had better programmers among my students at my community college) were actually getting paid to put those "years of work" into Word.

The Interview? Kim Jong-Un, you really shouldn’t have bothered

Gosh, maybe my eyes are faiing but that still from the movie seems to me to have three people in it, but only two are mentioned in the caption.

20 years on: The satirist's satirist Peter Cook remembered

And nobody has mentioned his fabulous appearance as Richard III in The Black Adder.

I can still remember cracking up at the great E.L Wisty on The Braden Beat, over fifty years ago now.

"Hello, we're from the World Domination League, may we dominate you?"

Re: "greatest British comedian of all time "

That's Streeb-GreebLING (or possibly Greeb-Streebling).

Here's Johnny! Top Ten fantasy Blu-ray boxsets and special editions

Good grief!

Well, OF COURSE, everything worth buying (except for Dr Who) is an American show.

What is the MATTER with people in the UK?

A general's tale of the US's Gulf War follies and Glyn Johns' life in music

" Now I don’t know about you, but the house band in my personal hell is the Eagles. "

What? While there's America (Horse with No Name)?

This and the dismissing of Gram Parsons cast severe doubt on the author's musical taste.

Hipsters snap up iPod Classics for $$$s after Apple kills rusty gadget

Just goes to show

There's one born every minute.

Intel buys Canadian ID-wrangler PasswordBox

"ABOOT"??????????

Has your headline writer ever MET a Canadian?

The pronunciation is ABOAT...

VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that

Re: What's the point?

I can still recall sitting in friend's care in 1969 listening to Fairport Convention's Si tu dois Partir on a turntable.

Of course, the car was stationary.

Jony Ive: Apple isn't here to make money. And students shouldn't use computers so much

Re: Theft

If Xerox didn't invent the GUI, perhaps you'd care to tell us who did?

Ada Lovelace Day: Meet the 6 women who gave you the 'computer'

In what way

"In their footsteps came Grace Hopper."

OK, Grace Hopper was already working on Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I machine in 1944 when a moth flew into a relay and brought the system down. It is her logbook entry which actually had the moth taped to the page and the legend "first actual case of a bug being found". (Note, this is NOT the origin of the term "bug" nor did Hopper ever claim that.)

Given that the ENIAC didn't work until after the end of the war, in what sense did Hopper come "in their footsteps"?

Zippy one-liners, broken promises: Doctor Who on the Orient Express

Re: @mr.K

I just rewatched the end of series 5 - the Pandorica story - and right at the end, as Amy and Rory, just-married, enter the TARDIS, the phone rings...

And during the conversation the Doctor says "no I get that it's important: an Egyptian godess loose on the Orient Express, in space".

I have to say I sometimes wonder how far in advance "the Moff" plans. Did he have the entire River Song saga in his mind when he wrote Silence in the Library, for example?

Anyway, just thought i'd mention it.

Re: The singer was cute

And thankfully the editing managed to disguise that immortal verse:

Two hundred degrees

That's why they call me Mr Fahrenheit,

I'm trav'ling at the speed of light

I wanna make a supersonic man out of you

And Brian May allegedly an astrophysicist!

Gotta say I've never enjoyed a Queen song as much. But that's not saying a great deal.

No one wants iOS 8 because it's for NERDS - dev

Oh I'll bet...

"iCloud Photo Library will be huge but it’s in beta and is switched off by default."

I'll say it will be huge - especially if it features naked photos of movie "stars".

Official: Turing's Bombe better than a Concorde plane

Re: Yes and no

Actually the Poles came up wth the Bomba, which was essentially six enigma machines hooked together and relied on the knowledge they had gained during the 1930s and the fact that the Nazis only used 3 wheels in the machine.

When they upped that to - IIRC - three chosen from possible eight, the bomba approach no longer worked.

Re: countless? (AC Pedant Rant!)

"Supposedly" shortene the war.

"Bomber" Harris was an insane empire-bulder who would not allow bombers to be used to help defend convoys bringing essential goods from N America.

The bmbing campaign made a sort of sense during the period from Dunkirk to D-Day, because it have the British the impression they were doing something.

If there's one thing reading WWII history has told me, it's that there was massive incompetence on both sides.

Plus ca change.

Re: Great stuff.

The Birstol Britannia, hands down, was the most beautifuly commercial aircraft.

BTW Concorde's big problem, according to my father who spent 40 years in the travel industry, was its range or lack of: Londo to New York, yes. Frankfurt to New York - too far.

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

Re: Touch typing

Did you ever learn to touch type a qwerty keyboard and, if so, how many wpm could you type?

AFAIK there has only been ONE study that showed the speed superiority of the Dvorak keyboard and that study was conducted - by Mr. Dvorak...

'Don't come telling me how "superior" command lines are - they aren't; what they are is "different".'

So, you have a directory ('folder' if you insist) with 500 files in it.

You want to delete the files which have "abc" *somewhere* in their names.

Command line: one line

GUI?????

Re: Formatting in WordPerfect 5.1

Even earlier than wordstar was runoff and its various offspring.

Re: Text editting

vi was the Visual Interface to the ex text editor and was written by Bill Joy.

This essentially kludgey nature of vi is reflected in the "insert mode" and "command mode" stupidity and the commands available in command mode, which are basically ex commands.

Re: Text editting

You missed out 110 and - my favourite - 134.5 baud.

Typically asynch terminals would do either hardware (X-on/X-off) or software (Control-S, Control-Q) flow controls.

Terminals that would only do software (and I recall working with a VT102 "clone") flow control posed problems for software - the emacs editor was a prime example - which used just about every key combination for something. I recall writing an emacs extension for those terminals. Don't, after 30 years, recall any details...

Re: Talking of 1-2-3

Basically you are talking about the difference between synchronous (or to IBM bisynchronous) terminals and asynch. ASCII/EBCDIC has nothing to do with it.

It is quite possible to have an asynchronous terminal working in "forms mode" where you did local form editing and then hit "transmit" to send the data to the host.

Asynch terminals would be switchable between the two modes, synchronous ones, not.

Re: Press any key

I believe it was Compaq who removed this error message some years ago, precisely because of this question.

Robot snaps on yellow RUBBER GLOVES, preps to invade Canada

" It is travelling west towards Victoria, more than 5,000km (3,100 miles) from its home and on the east coast of Canada. "

*And* on the east coast. Victoria is not only not on the east coast it is not on the west coast: it is in fact on Vancouver Island a 1.5 hour ferry ride from the mainland.

Not sure how the robot will cope with the ferry - presumably it won't have the money to pay its fare as a foot passenger, which means someone will have to bring it onto the ferry in their car. Will they be charged to the extra passenger we wonder?

Does anyone have an ETA? I must keep an eye out...

UK spooks STILL won't release Bletchley Park secrets 70 years on

Re: Zuse Z3

Well, Zuse restarted work on the Z4 in 1949 and sold one in 1950 to EFTH in Zurich, where it was in use until the early '60s.

So I'd say "small circle of German scientists" was exaggerating the case somewhat.

Your point a) is fairly self evident and Colossus was used almost exclusively (at least at first) for wheel setting not wheel breaking, which was still done by hand. (Donald Michie figured out an algorithm for Colossus to do that too.)

b) yes, although I'm not sure what your point is here - yes, had the Germans maintained strict signals discipline (Lorenz or Enigma) the outcome, or at least the duration, of the war might have been very different.

c) Does anybody consider relays electronic? They're electro-mechanical and Zuse's machine is frequently cited as the first electro-mechanical programmable computer.