* Posts by Julian Bradfield

231 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2008

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Microsoft signs settlement with US Justice Dept over 'immigration-related discrimination' claims

Julian Bradfield

Re: Proof of employability

In the UK, most employers, especially those who do employ people on visas, will ask to see your passport (or other proof of citizenship/residence). Do they have to? No. But it's the only sure defence they can plead if they do employ somebody who turns out not to have the right to work: "I checked the documents, here's the copy of them with my signature and date".

What a cluster fsck: New scheduling code plus Intel's Alder Lake CPU mix equals a slower Linux kernel 5.16

Julian Bradfield

And of course System Z and its ancestors have had hot-swappable cpus for several decades.

Informatica UKI veep was rightfully sacked over Highways England $5k golf jolly, says tribunal

Julian Bradfield

The salesman was fired as well.

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

Julian Bradfield

Re: An error from code that tempted people to try its boundaries

the message error is "Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed." and D. Knuth comment is "If you have been so devious as to get this message, you will understand it, and you will deserve no sympathy." (TeXbook, page 299) - from Google.

I have never managed to provoke it, but then I've never tried to interweave alignments.

Apparently \halign{\valign#\cr\cr suffices.

How Windows NTFS finally made it into Linux

Julian Bradfield

Re: Bad feeling

After one too many near disaster, I now have a bootable Linux on the usb stick on my keyring.

Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'

Julian Bradfield

Anybody read what they're commenting on?

Not the author of the article, it seems. This report is not a list of recommendations - it's a report of what individual lecturers said they were doing or thinking of doing, or even just thinking about thinking about.

Also, why did El Reg go the heavy handed route of filing a FoI request when they could just have emailed Dr Nagarajan and asked for it? Just for the sheer pleasure of making work for people?

GitHub picks Friday 13th to kill off password-based Git authentication

Julian Bradfield

Re: Can someone explain how

Sure. A token is a password that is so long and complex that you can't remember it, so you have to keep it somewhere where you can cut'n'paste it.

Microsoft releases command-line package manager for Windows (there are snags)

Julian Bradfield

Re: Restarts

@Richard 12: I've never heard of this, and it's not in the manpage for open(2), nor can I easily find any reference to it. Can you give a reference?

Watchdog 'enables Tesla Autopilot' with string, some weight, a seat belt ... and no actual human at the wheel

Julian Bradfield

Re: Comments are missing the point

SMBC is on this case:

http://smbc-comics.com/comic/fsd

Prince Philip, inadvertent father of the Computer Misuse Act, dies aged 99

Julian Bradfield

Re: forthright with outspoken opinions

Jake - as stated in the first paragraph of the provided link, MPs can make solemn affirmation if they don't want to make a Christian oath. They can also take an oath according to their own religious beliefs.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Julian Bradfield

When I type that query into google, I get a lot of governmental and medical pages.

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Julian Bradfield

buttons

The three (or five) physical buttons are one of the main reasons I buy thinkpad. I grew up with SunOS/Solaris and X, and you'll prise my physical middle mouse button out of my cold dead fingers...

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

Julian Bradfield

Re: Broken NFS

I recall a similar situation in the late 80s - a Pyramid Unix system (unimaginatively named Cheops) would allow a remote file access from the Vax to create a filename with / in it, if I remember correctly.

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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'

Julian Bradfield

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?

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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.

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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!

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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".

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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'

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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..?

Julian Bradfield

Re: Enquiries

There are things worse than Blackboard?

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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.

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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!

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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.

Julian Bradfield

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).

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

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.

Julian Bradfield

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.

Julian Bradfield

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

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

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

Re: This actually impacted quite a lot

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

Julian Bradfield

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!

Julian Bradfield

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

Julian Bradfield

Re: @iron

fake news. See

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

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