Posts by Julian Bradfield

NASA to stop using names like 'Eskimo Nebula' and 're-examine' what it calls cosmic objects

Re: Ban all Homonyms!

The new testament was not written in Hebrew. The confusion, if it is a confusion, may have arisen in Aramaic or Greek; Google will tell you far more than you wanted to know about what people think of this.

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

Re: Proudly ignorant

Your understanding is wrong. "Blacklist" long predates London clubs.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Age discrimination

According to my recently completed Equality training, job ads requiring N years' experience in something are generally illegal, because they amount to discriminating against younger candidates without any objective reason - candidate A might have spent 10 years mucking around 5% of the time with application X, while candidate B might have spent one year working full time with it. A job spec should list the competencies required.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

Are you seriously suggesting that two niche 20th century positive uses of "black" are sufficient to outweigh six centuries and several pages in the dictionary of negative uses?

Re: Thin end of the wedge?

That's not what blacklists are. The term goes back centuries, and is a list of bad (hence black, because black is bad in English culture) people, such as debtors, traitors, drunkards, or whatever. Networking blacklists ban bad hosts or bad packets.

Things can't go on like this. You need to get fit for the sake of your health. I'm going to write you a prescription for... an e-bike

why just social?

When I was recovering from a very severe respiratory (etc) illness many years ago, my consultant said he wished he could prescribe a skiing holiday. Well, why not:-?

Firefox 78: Protections dashboard, new developer features... and the end of the line for older macOS versions

URLbar

Just when I'd finally got used to the last change to the urlbar, a couple of months ago, they bugger around with it again. Why can't software projects leave an interface alone? Preferably for at least a decade...

Germany is helping the UK develop its COVID-19 contact-tracing app, says ambassador

Re: The strapline...

The Panzerlied is something completely different. The Deutschlandlied was the national anthem of the FRG too, though only the third verse was sung. Since unification, only the third verse has been the national anthem.

Re: The strapline...

Also, "uber" is a fake taxi service, not a German word.

Laws on police facial recognition aren't tough enough, UK data watchdog barrister tells Court of Appeal

Re: There's several issues with sitting judges today

Senior judges are almost always very clever people. They don't need to know *how* technology functions, because the law is unlikely to have any concern with that, except in the commercial and technology courts, where specialist judges are in charge. At the general law level, such as human rights law, judges need to know *what* its functions are, and what its functions can be extended to be. This does not require specialist knowledge of how a neural net works.

How do you run a military court over Zoom? With 28 bullet points and a ceremonial laptop flunkey, of course!

Lazy

Gareth hasn't read the document properly. There is no "ceremonial" removal of any laptop, it just goes along with its user - it's the court administrator's laptop that is removed during deliberation, not the judge's. Fairly obviously, a private deliberation shouldn't have somebody else's laptop there!

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

Re: £sd

The interpretation is standardized, and fairly easy to remember. All times starting with 12pm apart from 12:00:00.000000.... are after noon, and all times starting with 12am apart from 12:00:00.000000.... are before noon. (Except of course in Murrica, where the Government Printing Office adopted the opposite convention until they finally saw the light in 2008.)

Then, 12:00:00... am is made consistent with that, and has to be the start of the following day, because it's "before noon".

Re: Spelling

(a) "gram" is universally the preferred spelling in English-language science

(b) "gram" has been the legal spelling in UK statutes ever since we first legalized metric measures in 1864, though actual use, even by government, has always fluctuated according to the whim of the writer.

The question is why are you so keen to re-subjugate us to the French:)

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Anybody who produces printed documents should read Bringhurst. Not that he's perfect, but it's the best, and concisest, book I know.

Microsoft announces official Windows package manager. 'Not a package manager' users snap back

snap

"snap" is not the most fortunate word to use in this context ... if it was intentional it causes too much pain :)

The Rise of The (Coffee) Machines: I need assistance. I think I'm running Windows. Send help

Re: What annoys me intensely ...

I can't decide whether it's sick or wonderful that by googling that, I can get an IBM manual entry and dredge up my (entirely amateur) MVS knowledge of 35 years ago to understand it...

We dunno what's more wild: This vid of Japan's probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt

It was a 5g tantalum bullet fired at 300 m/s.

We lost another good one: Mathematician John Conway loses Game of Life, taken by coronavirus at 82

Re: Conway in Cambridge

Hi Paul :)

My strongest memory is when he was lecturing about ordinals using a blackboard on an easel, and having earlier written ω^ω^ω^.. (in normal layout, I mean), he then went on to talk about epsilons, and rather than writing ε_ε_ε_... he just picked up the blackboard and rotated it 90°. I give a lecture about ordinals every year or so, and I've always wanted to do that, but I've never had a blackboard on an easel.

Yeah, that Zoom app you're trusting with work chatter? It lives with 'vampires feeding on the blood of human data'

Jitsi?

Isn't Jitsi fairly safe, especially if you host it? (I tried to get my family to use it, but they prefer the easier interface of zoom..)

Hey, friends. We know it's a crazy time for the economy, but don't forget to enable 2FA for payments by Saturday

Eh? It's any old-style one with two sets of mouse buttons, e.g. X301

Help! I'm trapped on Schrodinger's runaway train! Or am I..?

Re: Enquiries

There are things worse than Blackboard?

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Re: On a related topic

"gift" as a verb is common in Scotland, too. It struck me when I first moved up here, but I've got used to it.

Blood, snot and fear: Why the travelling lone tech reporter should always knock twice

Re: lucky you...

The way I remember it is that all times starting 12:...pm are after noon, apart from 12:00:00.00000000... itself, while 12:....am times are all before noon.

lucky you...

if the resident had been in, you might now have a bullet through your chest...

Watch tiny swimming magnetic robots suck up uranium in a droplet of radioactive wastewater

I'm not sure that turning the sea into a 1% solution of H₂O₂ is a very good idea.

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

Re: I go bang!

My heating system needs a six-way connection from controller/boiler to valves etc., all told. When I needed to replace a valve, I spent two hours very carefully tracing the cables, checking, double-checking, and re-checking. Glad I did, as the installer had used two standard 3-core mains cables, and was using the second earth wire to carry the (mains live) signal from the hot water thermostat to the controller. That cable has a big red flag on it now.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

Wrong. The final -e was pronounced up until the late Middle English period - if you read Chaucer, you have to pronounce final -e (except before a following vowel) to make it scan. It started dropping from around that time.

Re: Surely it's just a bit of civility

Since you ask..because civility does not require me to tell lies. I speak a language with sexed pronouns - it hasn't had grammatical gender for a thousand years. Referring to something as "she" is a statement that it is female (I'm not a nautical type, so I don't even follow the tradition of making ships female).

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

The statement that gender is a fact of biology is controversial. Usually sex is a fact of biology, and gender is a social construction. If you think our social constructions (girls wear pink, boys wear blue, for example) are biological, that's quite an elastic definition of biology.

For real this time, get your butt off Python 2: No updates, no nothing after 1 January 2020

Re: The fork is already out there

But e^i tau = 1 doesn't tell you so much - if e^i 2pi = 1, then you know that e^i pi is +1 or -1, but not which.

Re: The fork is already out there

Probably the reason is that τ is 2π - there are people who think that τ is a nicer fundamental constant than π.

So Python will finally be a stable and reliable piece of software!

Get rekt: Two years in clink for game-busting DDoS brat DerpTrolling

Re: Hackers v crackers v DDoSers

These uses of "cracker" do not seem to be noted in either the OED or Merriam-Webster - they say a "cracker" is A contemptuous name given in southern States of N. America to the ‘poor whites’; whence, familiarly, to the native whites of Georgia and Florida. Quotations claim various etymologies: "a name they have got from being great boasters", or "supposed to have been suggested by their cracking whips over oxen or mules in taking their cotton to the market."

This major internet routing blunder took A WEEK to fix. Why so long? It was IPv6 – and no one really noticed

Re: This actually impacted quite a lot

But as pointed out in the very first two comments, longer prefixes were not impacted!

Why would anybody notice, particularly? Surely the individually allocated IPv6 blocks are all much smaller than /12, so their announced routes will take priority over the /12 route. (APNiC allocates /32s, I think.)

Baltimore hit with more ransomware, ChinaMobile gets the boot in the US, and another (mild) Systemd system-d'oh!

Re: Why are Chinese Products so Cheap?

Slave wages? USD900/month is comfortably more than the salary of a schoolteacher here in Croatia. The average salary here in the capital is €850.

Google Pay tells Euro users it has ditched UK for Ireland ahead of Brexit

Re: @iron

fake news. See

https://fullfact.org/economy/uks-poverty-rate-around-average-eu/

Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf

Re: Correction to popular myth about RSA

Many important ideas in maths have been invented independently by multiple people. We try not to get hung up on who happened to be first, and sometimes the person it's named after isn't the first, but the one who did more with it, or was just lucky to be on this side of the Iron Curtain. If you work for a secret organization, you have to give up on getting things named after you! (And Cocks seems happy with that.)

Microsoft 'welcomes dialog' over HoloLens use by the military, but doesn't have to listen

Re: Lethality

Why? lethality has been around for 350 years, while lethalness doesn't even rate a mention in the OED.

Microsoft decides Internet Explorer 10 has had its fun: Termination set for January 2020

Barclays' website for personal customers is equally crap. It refuses to run on Firefox on Linux at all. Until recently, it wouldn't run on Chrome on Linux, either...for the last few times, I have been able to use Chrome...just hope it lasts long enough for me to complete the transfer of all my business away from them, and even close the bank account I opened when I was 16 (rather a long time ago)...

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

Drivel. Firstly, once the Swiss have finished their service, they *may* keep their rifle subject to successful application for a permit, but few do - I've never met a Swiss who has a military gun in the house. Secondly, they are *not* allowed to have the ammunition for it - that is issued from the local armory only if an emergency arises. (They can use their weapons for training on ranges, but can't take ammunition away from the range.)

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

No mouse buttons, it seems - is there at least a virtual middle mouse button?

HSBC now stands for Hapless Security, Became Compromised: Thousands of customer files snatched by crims

Re: There's no excuse...

So how many tokens do you carry around with you? I would change banks if I had to carry around a card-reader or token just to do everyday transactions - one reason I'm ditching Barclays, in addition to their appalling SmartInvestor.

Congrats from 123-Reg! You can now pay us an extra £6 or £12 a year for basically nothing

easydns . Been happy with them for decades now, and they're in Canada, not owned by GoDaddy, and have a robust attitude to most things.

Cosmoboffins think grav waves hold the key to sorting out the disputed Hubble Constant

Timbo - the evaporation time for a galactic black hole is around 10^90 - 10^100 years. Not going to happen for a *very* long time after all the stars are dead;)

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

Re: Calls and Email

Do you never use your phone to tether your actual work device? It's talking about tethering, nothing more.

Re: Calls and Email

Read more carefully. It doesn't do email, it just provides connectivity to your email-reading device. (How I used to do email in about 2002, and still prefer to.)

Iron Mike Pence blasts Google for its censor-happy Dragonfly Chinese search engine

Re: Bing!

I tried, and the Chinese search returns large numbers of pictures of the event including gruesome photos of dead protesters. So I don't understand your claim.

The 2018 ThinkPad X1 Yoga: A bendy-legged workhorse walks into a meeting

I don't think I mean either of those. I think it's called Windows Instant Resume, or something like that. The latest (before this) batch of Yogas ditched (BIOS-advertised) support for S3 sleep in favour of Instant Resume, which is basically S1, I think. My first gen X1 Yoga will happily last me a weekend of light use, being suspended when not in use; that doesn't work according to those unhappy bunnies who got the later ones.

And does it support real suspend-to-RAM, rather than the idiotic Windows thing that still chews through your battery?