Posts by Stevie 7284 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
The headline is not as clever as you thought - remove the word "see" and it scans properly phonetically & punny (but no longer makes strict grammatical sense in English).
As for Google and Facebook, all we can assume from their publicity is that their racist AI's keep their cards closer to their circuitboards than the Microsoft one did.
Good to see that 60 years of Computer Science results in a speedy jump backward in terms of political philosophy.
Interesting. In the mid 70s everyone saw the inherent wisdom of the Japanese practice of supplying a room equipped with a dummy who would stand in for the boss or a customer or the firm or whatever. Employees could retire to the room and rage-beat the dummy when the pressure got too much.
Now, 40 years on, employers don't get the need to vent about perceived injustice at work, actively seek out evidence of such activity on the web and take even more punative action when they find it.
I can't wait to see what the next big pradigm change will wreak. Child chimney sweeps?
This worthless so-called "study" also fails entirely to account for the number of drones brought down by bird-strikes, the number of birds brought down by drone-strikes, and the number of drones brought down by drone-strikes. It also understates the effects of the number of birds brought down by bird-strikes.
Then we get into the completely ignored three-body issues: drone-drone-plane, drone-bird-plane, bird-drone-bird ... well I think the point is made.
And given recent events in Russia, I'm appalled that the drone-bird-exploding meteor scenario hasn't been at least explored.
But you'd think that the government would be able to come up with some sort of incentive To attract new hires. Now what do they control that they could usfully use to make a government job more attractive to someone, someone working for less money up front who would need to make that stretch further? How to make it feel like the take-home pay is actually more than it is? Even some gross measure that would net some sort of advantage...
Design your own amplifier did you? Or just slavishly copy the layout in the magazines.
Design your own computer did you, or just slavishly get your dad to buy you one?
And yes. In my Physics "A" level exam. Wouldn't have worked, but I realized that ten seconds after "pencils down" and could have fixed it there and then if not for time crunch and the invigilator's beady eyes.
"Mashing up other people's work to create something different, and possibly better, is what we call progress."
No, it's what we call plagiarism. Progress comes from pulling apart other people's work and *understanding* how it does what it does, then using that knowledge to do more. In a world where electronic maker forums are populated with people who do not know the difference between an LED and an incandescent light bulb we are not seeing progress. We are seeing "Monkey See, Monkey Fry Another LED".
If you had been less eager to snark you might have read what I actually wrote instead of what you wanted me to have written. My problem is not with the device or the way it is to be used, it is with those saying "Well that won't work because they aren't learning to code like I did on my BBC model B".
But judging by your response all you saw was the frightening news that your own experience was becoming obsolete as a learning model. Welcome to the real world. You helped usher it in with your Model B/Spectrum/Whatever it was back in 1982.
That I should have been brought so low. Downvoted by SINKs and DINKs on El Reg. *sob*
I love the comments from the people who lived once in a dramatically changing world, but want the world not to have changed any more so that their (1980s-era) experience and methods are relevant.
My take? The computer revolution of the 80s gathered up all those kids who would have otherwise been soldering components to make drum machines or guitar amps. Doubt me? Ask anyone from the hobby electronics publishing industry. That market died almost overnight as PCs became a reality.
But today? The "maker community" is as much about mashing up other people's work as originating and understanding. To grab that potential you have to modify your approach.
Or, to put it another way: These days you are trying to attract the attention of a generation born to the passive computer experience: if you want it, you buy or stealz it. Getting this mental set into the mode of "let's write a program from scratch" is a non-starter. You have to show them why they would want to do that first.
You know; like you do with everything else when your audience is children.
Whereas in America, the black hole in pensions is blamed on "unenforceable" contracts made in the "golden age" promising "too much" in terms of retirement benefits.
But is actually caused by the administering organization not funding the financial instruments upon which those benefits were calculated for years upon years.
See: New Jersey State Govt., Wisconsin State Govt., [insert state name] State Govt.
Caveat: Contracts to deliver bonuses to junior officer ranks and above in the Banking sector are considered "Extremely Enforceable" and not subject to debate even by the people called upon to fund such bonuses when the said officers prove incompetent in the highest degree.
"Easily"? Did anyone say it would be easy?
My guess is that the "hacker" was once a colleague of a certain Mr Snowden and has access to some ferocious processing power, ad-hoc chip fabbing plant etc.
Or maybe the iPhone can be hacked with a mashed Bic pen like those super-expensive bike locks were back when bikes were cool.
Yeah, I remember ours: open between 9 and 5 weekdays and up til noon on a Saturday.
Real friendly for the commuting worker (ie the vast majority of the locals).
By the time I had the tap apart and discovered the problem they were closed again.
Hard to see how Home Despot took them out of the picture.
I understand the difference.
But to most of the rest of the world they both are just ways of delivering up previously stored information on demand.
You need to run statements like those in the article through a "where user comprehension class =" filter before charging phasers.
The good news is that people like us are the ones making the case for the technology based on use case.
The bad news is that we have to make the reasons for the choice made comprehensible to those who have little to no background in the way this stuff works.
Let's hope we are a bit more circumspect and patient than your average El Reg commentard, eh?
Heh. My first DPM (Data Processing Manager) was a cost clerk promoted sideways by his peers as a scheme to get rid of him. Computers, you see, were going to be " a passing fad".
The guy could have been the model for Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss. The early drawings even looked like him.
It turns out to be ridiculously easy to write a poor man's Git.
vi pmgit
i
#!/bin/ksh
ls ${1}*.old | sort -r > filelist
while read myfile
do
cp myfile myfile.old
done < myfile
cp $1 $1.old
(esc)
ZZ
chmod 777 pmgit
Then, as needed: pmgit [filename]
Job done.
I was going to add code to make it work in different directories but then I thought "why not just put a copy of pmgit in every directory on the computer and be done?"
So improper parameter validation in a user-written subroutine is somehow Microsoft's fault?
Sorry, Kubla Cant. With the best will in the world I can only shake my head and declare this an own goal by the people you worked for.
VB had many issues that had to be worked around, but lazily leaning on the VARIANT datatype to stand duty for whatever you needed at that moment in time with no verification and trusting in the good will of the universe was and is an obvious non-starter.
Azathoth, even in the days of Cobol on the mainframe we knew better than to let a computer take a hint-less guess. That's how so many CS graduates "know" Cobol "doesn't work". They lazily used COMPUTE on mixed numeric types once, got a C- on their course project and never cracked the manual to read the "NEVER DO THIS - because" page included in every version I've ever seen. Thus, they go on to make the same mistake in their beloved language of choice in their first job.
He's claiming the right to publish what he does under the first amendment, and paradoxically saying that he didn't write the stuff anyway (so presumably it isn't his speech he's talking about) .
The fifth amendment gets invoked when he is in front of The Do Nothing Congress.
Yes, I had one of those too, when I had to lug around a "Silent 7000" teletype.
Not silent. only semi-portable. Slower than spelling stuff over a phone sometimes, and required a "standard" handset that was not standard at the time, so one of those had to be carried around too.
Would it save time if I just agreed yours was bigger?
Of course all the biometric scanned data along with the inevitable linked social security numbers, last known addresses, known associates, family members, fingerprint and DNA information will be strongly encrypted and stored in such a way as to make association of the data by mere physical proximity impossible.
What? What did I say that was so funny?
On another front: FBI says "We only want into one locked iPhone. When we say "one" we mean ten lots of "one". At first. But we will get those whachacallits, warrants, for all the others we want to look at. Otherwise the terrorists win."
I havn't automated a Microsoft Excel sheet for years (2000 was the last version I worked on at this level) but I immediately thought what you said about activating and selecting when I read the account.
Your comment about "only so much VBA and no further" attitudes is spot on. There is a double standard inculcated in Western CS graduates that if they didn't get indoctrinated in it in college it dowsn'tbwork, and therefore it is the language's shortcomings to blame rather than a lack of proper know-how on the part of the programmer.
While I wouldn't use VBA to script anything these days it is because I don't write macro code for office and have script tools better suited to the tasks I do want to do than any "brokenness" in the language per se.
And of course, automation that self-launches in any but the most controlled environments is horribly dangerous in any computer language with late binding.
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