Posts by Andrew Richards 60 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2008
In a time when the open-plan office was full of CD-drive equipped PCs used as monitor stands... it didn't take much effort to write a little VB to create a networked application to open the CD drawer. It didn't take long to find an unlocked PC on which this could be installed. Days of fun followed with being able to remotely open the drive on colleagues' PCs.
Just done this: at the bottom of the window - admittedly in a smaller font size than everything else is "Copilot may make mistakes". Yes, a lot of what is available is impressive. I use Copilot daily largely as a proxy for web-searching for information in a domain in which I'm (apparently) "expert": i.e. I can tell if it's producing something useful or nonsense.
But that's the problem: would Windows Calculator be useful if every Nth calculation was wrong? That what he doesn't understand: impressive is one thing, until it's infallible it's a new type of computing. It's not deterministic and accurate, it's sometimes potentially wrong. Microsoft - and to be fair, everyone else - has to sell this element with the product. People are used to believing what a computer tells them: it's massively irresponsible to push something that's new-shiny without being honest about this bit. If they don't people will be burnt by this and stop believing the hype.
But it gets worse: this in the same week where MS are pushing future Copilot-agentive stuff will requires read AND write access to your data. Ignore what they're doing with your data and where: is Suleyman going to put money on this and compensate the first home user using this and Copilot accidentally deleting a folder of holiday photographs?
No, it's - obviously - not. Yes, AI is a threat to many things to some extent but when the AI is very obviously making stuff up with summaries that are associated with the BBC and not Apple then the damage from inaccuracy for some people is going to stick to the BBC. It's nothing to do with bias, it's an automated system being wrong.
What about a summary of your post being "Reg reader demands puppies be drowned at birth"?
... if I had any hope they'd keep them going. Got burnt once with Google Latitude (personally, the most useful thing that wasn't search; and I know alternatives exist but...).
After Wave, G+, that home-automation thin they bought and killed, etc. why bother? "Just" Android, Chrome, search and maps; everything else is ephemeral.
Original post wasn't explicitly suggesting that "computers can do more than one thing at a time" is their understanding of how it all works. Do lots of things by rapidly switching between them so you usual can't tell is close enough. Calm down, pedant.
But... my hard disk is retrieving data and will cause an interrupt to awaken a suspended thread and interrupt the current one (not that I'll notice) so it is doing more than one thing at a time. I think the network card is busy doing its stuff too. And that's before we talk "cores". Misunderstanding is yours, I think...
... and don't forget ! to poke a 32 bit word.
There was some basic protection on tape games. It was possible to set a byte so code could only be executed and not just loaded.
However, it was also fairly simple to hook a few bytes of code into the screen refresh event to reset the byte in question 25(?) times a second to circumvent this. All to allow tape games to be moved to disks, which often involved another step to work-around the loss of a couple of k to the disc driver code. Load at &1900 (or &1100), copy down to &E00 and then run. Those were the days. Will stop now as I've an onion to tie to my belt.
I think it's less a case of "not rocking the boat" and more of trying to do anything in an environment where it will get a kicking for doing it.
The Murdoch press in the UK is unsurprisingly rabidly anti-BBC, as is the Daily Mail. (Amusingly the most balanced reporting the latter managed recently was its coverage of Top Gear in Argentina: it couldn't - as usual bash the BBC because that might have sided with the other side.) The current government is a general threat to it too.
It's a shame it can't just get on with what's it's doing and be left to it. It's unusual for any form of media to be as self-scrutinising as the BBC (how negative was the phone hacking coverage on Sky?) The last BBC DG left over the Saville programme largely because he was given such a hard time on the Today programme.
Surely a lot of all of this come down to "license fee? boo! I don't watch Strictly!" and ignores the other output which is well worth the money and wouldn't exist commercially (Radio 3/4, 6 Music).
I think that's closer to what ? does now. E.g. dictionary[helper?.getAdaptor()?.getProperty()]?.or(defaultValue)
Aren't they suggesting a new non-nullable type to complement "type?" ("type!") that would mean constructor have to explicitly instantiate the object as they do for value types?
Although C# is still quite neat given it's a v6 heading towards v7. A lot of recent changes are syntactic simplifications so there's an element of moving towards simplicity rather than complication. (Obviously, YMMV but LINQ, the TPL, async/await, yield return (etc.) all make the older alternatives look awkward.)
I have line of sight from my house to the BT's Adastral park on the outskirts of Ipswich. I'm 1.5 miles from my exchange (where overheads run along the road inbetween). If I were on the same exchange on the other side of the nearest main road I'd be on BT Inifinity (as I would if I were further from the town centre).
Being on the wrong side of the road means BT offers 2-3Mb/s, which happily is an underestimate given fiddling with internal wiring and a decent router mean I can get 5Mb/s.
Hardly miles from anywhere and I'm probably one of the lucky ones. Yes, living up a mountain away from a running water supply and the demand for a fast internet connection might be a bit optimistic. However, there are pockets of (relative) civilisation that are just in slightly the wrong place so get overlooked.
I might be surrounded by fields but then if you choose to live in a city centre than you shouldn't expect to be have access to foodstuffs grown elsewhere, oh... :)
I buy gender bias being a thing. It's more subtle than implying rampant and overt locker-room type sexism (which, deservedly gets headlines when it happens).
Some auditions for professional orchestras use screens to hide identify (and so gender) of applicant. Number of women selected increases when this happens.
Never had delivery issues once I got used to adding delivery instructions to leave near front door (depot for pick up is about an hour away...)
As well as their lockers they're moving into other collection points too: including a local Halfords, which was a bit of a surprise to some of the staff when I went to collect a parcel recently.
Obviously YMMV but I signed up just for free delivery. Prime Video was a nice bonus. And this week Prime Music streaming is an extra bonus.
Amazon Fire TV is a nice device and a decent UI given they're basically just trying to sell you stuff. (Shame there's no direct local media playback yet and Plex devs not wanting to dirty themselves with DVD rips.)
That I understand but is that a problem. Mickey Mouse is still a going concern: Disney are churning out stuff using Mickey Mouse. Why should I be able to appropriate the mouse-ears image after X years if they're still actively using it?
As for intention of copyright law isn't there an element that this was design as a protection with the assumption stuff would have a limited shelf life? Life of originator is arbitrary anyway: I could design a cartoon character and set up a business (with other people) to develop cartoons. I might live to be 100 or get killed tomorrow; if the latter the business should still benefit, surely?
There are anomalies here but I don't get that it's all bad. (E.g. the very limited Bob Dylan releases to keep his early recordings protected.) I thought "IP monopoly" was an odd phrase. Disney's unending benefit might not have been the intention but I don't think me being able to appropriate notable names and designs is ideal either.
> Yeah it kinda figures that even the Church can't work out what the dates are...
Theologians exist largely to count angels and justify fairly obvious discrepancies that were introduced but can't be corrected.
What's important for dates: solar or lunar calendar? Let's have both (Christmas, Easter respectively). Creation story? Let's have two in Genesis within a few lines. Commandments? Yes, ten please. Although there's more than one list and they're not exactly the same. And there's more than ten, too.
Don't like gay people? Justify that nonsense on the old testament. And ignore lots of other stuff that's just as explicitly prohibited but less convenient. (Gay: no; shellfish: don't care; mixed fabrics: don't care; blatant hypocrisy: don't care, obviously.).
Well food costs them the same.
However, your core argument is quite common: why pay for something that's of no interest. The counter would be that if you can't find anything on the BBC then you're not looking hard enough. The license fee covers radio too, and personally:
I. I'd pay a chunk of the license fee for Radio 3, and I only regularly listen on a Saturday morning.
2. I'd pay almost all of the license fee just for Radio 4. It's great, really. I'm not a heavy user but there's no commercial equivalent.
3. I'd pay the license just for 6 Music, and would do so just for Radcliffe & Maconie.
And there's the BBC website (which is huge); and iPlayer. For £150 it's a bargain, really. Make the BBC commercially funded and, yes, we'd be £150 a year better off. But considerably poorer.
Never mind writing any number of top Beatles tunes; never mind Wings ("the band the Beatles could have been" - Alan Partridge) the man wrote and played the bass on Rain by T'Beatles. A little respect.
As for coasting by on past glories? Even if true this is hardly uncommon. As much as I love their music *cough* Stone Roses *cough*. etc.
If this is performance I saw something similar. Before: snappy and a joy to use; post-update: sluggish to the point of wanting to take a hammer to it.
Advice like cache-clearing didn't do much. However, the boot-up factory reset did work. Slight pain having to re-enter credentials for apps (and I know Google do back-up some, if you use that) but it's now as pleasant as it was before.
I don't justify having to do this but it worked here and spousal approval restored. YMMV.
Badly written programs will be slow and buggy. .net doesn't cause this; the problem is in the chair not the run time.
When I see an open source program my heart sinks: more abandon-ware and needless forks. We can all make random faulty generalisations...
But this is how television is made. With a political story a news program will fairly needlessly send a reporter to stand outside a building where something happened: nothing that couldn't be conveyed by same reporting in studio. It's the background that matters, in that it's an attempt to make it interesting visually.
With Wonders... and now Human Planet same thing applies. Could you everything with a blackboard and chalk but it's television first, education second.
And, to be fair, to an extent the science literate aren't really the audience. This is, trying to, popularise science. It's trying to make "Cosmo" now, and that means with today's TV techniques.
That's not to suggest I think they're beyond criticism: I'd like more detail and an equation or two...
"... zippy performance, something the original BBC Micro was not entirely famous for."
A 8-bit computer with a 2 MHz CPU from 30 years ago wouldn't really compare to a Cray from the same time but slow, really? Elite, Revs, Aviator, Firetrack (etc.) were fast enough for the time and anything written by Gary Partis was usually too fast to be playable (Psycastria is quite enjoyable under emulation - when slowed down!)
Slap in a 16k ROM and there was real-time spell checking available years (a decade?) before this appeared in Word.
... because some of it it actually quite good: Latitude D630 here: solid machine, never had an issue despite some on the road abuse (being dropped , flooded with coffee, etc.) Daily use for 7-8 years and will only be replaced when absolutely necessary. (Experience of Inspiron laptop for a client quite the reverse; caveat emptor, etc.)
