Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Years ago I had a boss who asked how long it would take me to do a complex task.
"Three days."
"What if I said you only had two?"
"It would still take three days of me working through lunch, taking no breaks, staying late and working when I get home. This isn't Star Trek and I don't inflate my estimates so I can pull a "Scotty". You say you need this badly, I take you at your word. It would be helpful if you would take me at mine."
That was the end of that particular stupidity.
Once again we see a so-called survey in which bias is built-in from the get-go.
The sample should include groups of women, men, transgender individuals and all should be represented by both bearded and non-bearded persons.
These people should be made to wear burkhas and to speak through randomly cycling frequecy shifters when answering the survey to avoid biasing the quizmaster with visual and/or sonic cues.
Each should also wear a harness that can deliver small shocks to various parts of their bodies so that a consistent and non-gender identifying mode of fidgeting can be imposed on the sample.
To be absolutely rigorous the subjects shouldn't know to which group they belong, nor whether or not they are clean-shaven.
Or legibility or maturity.
A computer language is just a tool. The job you do with it is partly predicated by your actual knowledge of how to use it and for which jobs it is intended, and lots more predicated by your preconceptions of what it can't do (which is just a way of saying "what I can't do with it 'cos I don't know how").
Now pass me the Stillson's so I can give this Rover slush-box valve a good thump and get the shift working again.
And another young man discovers that the hubris-rich axiom from his CS degree course "Unix admins doon't need an 'are you sure?' button because Unix admins know what they are doing" has an important unspoken loophole: "until they don't".
Unless this is a misidentified April Fool and the Satanic Messages In Harry Potter story rides again.
Life would be so much easier if within thew theater the cell signal was squelched, but that is illegal here in the land of the free(tard).
"What if someone has an emergency?" I hear the usual claque howl.
Then someone can step outside the theater into the corridor and make a call somewhere where the Dolby 8.27 UrfKwake(tm) surround sound won't be drowning out their voice too.
Ah, RCA. I remember walking back from a distant pub after closing time one winter's eve around Christmas with four friends, one whom was in posession of a fifth absent friend's copy of Hunky Dory, pressed by RCA.
"Hey" says Mark, studying the back of the sleeve. "This album is made of Dynaflex!"
"Wossat then?" I say to general ridicule.
"It's this new stuff that's almost indestructible" says Gary. "You can bend the album in two, edges touching and all that, and it will play just fine after an' all."
"Gerroudavit!" I respond.
"I'll show ya" says Mark, breath steaming in the well-below freezing air, and draws the disc from its sleeve.
"Er, that's Mick's record" I say, nervously. We were none of us feeling any pain after a couple of pints each (seventeen, ah youth) and this was shrugged off by everyone as "a detail".
"Watch and be amazed!" Says Mark, bends the album edges toward each other.
A sharp crack and the air is full of tiny flying razor-sharp shards of plastic.
And just like that a miserable freezing night is transformed into high merriment and neighbourly shouts of "Bugger off, you kids!"
"Donate"?
Donate the Innuit family and sled team? The three different colored dragons with broken chains? The lear jet that seats 8 plus two pilots? The Viking ship with crew? The Pirate ship with crew and working cannons and a secret compartment in the poop deck c/w treasure chest? The three foot wide, two and a half foot tall castle "with everything"? The farm? The polar reasearch station?
Dream on. They are mine for research purposes now.
Dear sir, My Fridays consist of sitting at a desk being sneered at by thirty-somethings who think Unix is hard, computers are clever and older mainframe era staff are shirt thick.
At my desk my job is to look for the dumbass mistake made in the latest script written by "our best script guy" and fix it, while being yelled at by people who think I am responsible for the code in question.
My daughter has announced her intention to move 1700 miles away, leaving her sizable collection of Playmobil behind. Said collection includes many items long out of production and hence rare, and also many items only sold in Canada.
In short, I have the motivation and the equipment, and a strong desire to leave Mr Coder neck deep in his own work.
Gissajob!
I'd have more sympathy for the music conglomorates if they hadn't spent my entire music-buying youth delivering rock-bottom quality at top-shelf prices.
EMI used to whine about how it was going bust because of all the home taping going on, while quietly not mentioning the sales figures for its own blank recording tape division.
Pre-recorded cassettes were always a joke too. No album art or info, cheap as shirt cassettes with ferric oxide tape. In 85 they made Brothers in Arms on Chrome Dioxide tape and claimed it as high quality, apparently unaware of the two decades of development that had produced super avalyn and similar proprietary materials that were both better from a signal reproduction standpoint and less abrasive to the transcription equipment itself.
So cry me a river, music congloms.
Oh well.
You Don't suppose this is another one of Apples retarded, doomed-from-the-get-go strategies to persuade people to switch to the Mac do you?
We are talking here about the company that once got famous people to say on air that installing a printer on a Windows computer required removing the case. In 1996.
That is the major factor currently keeping me out of the cinema. At close to twenty bux a pop now, having the little oblong searchlights shining back at me is intolerable.
Actually, it would be intolerable at any price.
So I rarely go to a movie and never in the opening week. I wait until the fucktards are bored with whatever it is, and then go if I can be arsed.
Figures.
I only just got that fucking app working on Saturday by dint of installing the "bricking" update on all the family ipads.
Didn't brick a one, by the way. Bar genius told me that that issue was down to people not knowing their Apple account password. Not sure that jibes with others' experience, but our various ipads upgraded seamlessly.
Oh for Azathoth's sake! The point of nanny laws s not just the protection of the stupid, it's the protection of everyone else from the fallout of the stupid.
The idiot who sets his corpse on fire by not turning off the electricity before touching the high-voltage line also burns down the building containing sensible people who never even knew the dimwit was there.
The brainless twat who shoots someone else's child in the eye with a pellet gun. I could go on but there are as many illustrative examples in the world as you wish to notice.
Am I the only one who watches YouTube just to see the looks of outraged disbelief on the faces of kids who reap the inevitable rewards of riding a unicycle down the handrail of a twenty foot flight of concrete steps?
Turns out you most cemrtainly do have to tell some people. Judging by teh intarwebs, you have to tell most of 'em.
Well since every EULA I've ever read contains language expressly denying that the product you just licensed will do what it says on the box I'd say a) that the three monkey clause is redundant and 2) there are bigger fisg to fry before the software industry's legal eagles can be said to have been putbin their place.
" Giving it a name and a logo was supposed to raise awareness, however, it means the next proper big bug with a codename and badge may be taken less seriously than it should."
I have some bad news for you. Any bug with a codename and a badge is only taken seriously by those who coined the name and minted the badge.
That's how we still see unpatched heartbleed vulnerabilities. If the initial attack had been a tad more subtle I don't doubt we'd still be seeing the I Heart You vulnerability too, but being belted over the head with a brick so hard you see God is bound to get everyone's attention.
This is what happens when you fire the engineers and hire fuckwits.
I imagine a room full of twenty-somethings in blue shirts spitballing what the next "great" feature of Windows 10 will be in the usual atmosphere of texting and browsing on smartphones instead of "being there". Someone looks up from a cat video, aware that he must contribute something today, looks down again at the glass slab in his hand and says "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if ..."
Unisys had some back in the 90s that were produced in a depressing three color scheme (grey, red and black on white paper) depicting Fidel Castro presenting two eager children wearing patched long combination underwear with 8" floppy discs which appeared to be infested with earthworms.
The inspirational message read: Don't give your computer a "virus". (The wording may be off, but the quotes around "virus" are as on the poster).
The fact that this poster looked exactly like some inspirational posters a colleague had brought back from behind the iron curtain a decade before was icing on the cake.
The salient point is that if as much energy had been spent actually doing proper space science as blithering about the proper way to call things too far off to see, we might actually have been able to go out and have a look for ourselves instead of getting all our info third hand from the Anti-Pluto League and their exclusive access to mega-telescopes.
There's another bunch who are bleating about Lake Huron not being a real lake at all, just a bulge and that means it shouldn't be called a lake and that is important because ... well, it seems to be the only way to get your name on a paper if you are a lackluster waste of space who can't think up any real lake-science to publish.
When you let lab-shy chemists loose in the halls of academia you end up with the mind-numbing dross that is the end of the periodic table. The pioneers found stuff and named it later - even stuff that needed a nuclear accelerator and a very fast stopwatch to find. The current useless bunch name stuff and argue about naming stuff and are so busy doing so they haven't got time to actually fire up the Relativistic Collidotron and find any of it.
Scientists! Do science first, argue about what to call it after!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
