Posts by J.G.Harston

US kids apparently talking like Peppa Pig... How about US lawmakers watching Doctor Who?

Pah! The One True Way to pronounce "scone" has two syllables.

IBM so very, very sorry after jobs page casually asks hopefuls: Are you white, black... or yellow?

Indigenous? Indigenous to where? I'm indigenous to Yorkshire.

Re: Big Blue ?

Blue is Beautiful. Blue is Best.

I'm Blue, I'm Beautiful, I'm Best!

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

I have four Arm-based computers here on which I toil away on producing, testing and documenting code.

Data breach rumours abound as UK Labour Party locks down access to member databases

Re: Problem Solved...

Tax all foreigners living in foreign countries.

The electoral register solely has your name and address, so it's fairly beneign in content, and election candidates *need* to have the electoral register in order to perform their requirements of being an election candidate - they need to know who are elegible to vote for them, and in order to become a candidate who can nominate them.

UK.gov pens Carillion-proofing playbook: Let's run pilots of work before we outsource it, check firms' finances

UK.gov ?

I know our politicians likes climbing up Trump's backside, but we are not a department of the US government yet.

What's in a name? Quite a bit when it's the most hated abbreviation of 2018 (GDPR, of course)

Well, the International Secret Intelligence Service had to change business....

Register Lecture: Right to strike when your boss sells AI to the military?

It's the owners of a company that have the right to decide what a company does - that's what the ownership of private property means. If the workers want to direct the actions of the company they are at perfect liberty to buy it. If the workers do not like producing the products the company produces, they are at perfect liberty to cease working for the company.

WWW = Woeful, er, winternet wendering? CERN browser rebuilt after 30 years barely recognizes modern web

Re: Works fine...

They don't resolve, though. I can fetch pages from my website via the 'Fetch document' menu item (and they display quite well), but following any links gives 'This site has caused a finangle' error.

What did turbonerds do before the internet? 41 years ago, a load of BBS

A couple of years ago I rediscovered the artwork for the first leaflets I ever did, on my Spectrum and Alphacom printer!

Techie in need of a doorstop picks up 'chunk of metal' – only to find out it's rather pricey

Re: Have you ever heard a story about something you did told second-hand?

I went searching for the lyrics to the Porterhouse Blue college song. The search lead me back to my own website where I'd transcribed and translated it ten years ago.

Dratted hipster UX designers stole my corporate app

Re: I would like to show you my bank site redesign...

My bank's online site changed from a nice neat ledger layout of accounts, transactions, and amounts, y'know, 'cos it's finances and numbers and wotnot, and changed to the modern faddish finger-painting nonsense.

Re: or an un-improvable legacy interface designed a thousand years ago by a goblin

"so why must we have a responsive design and a 1/3 of the screen blank??"

Because humans (y'know, the ones who you expect to be using your system) read by difting their eyes *downwards*, ****NOT**** by draggin them acroooosssssssssssssss the screeeeeeeennnnn to the far edge then

bang! across back to the left then draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggggggggggggginnngggggg across again thn

bang! back to the left then.... etc..

In order for your content to enter your user's brains on a wide screen it ****NEEDS**** to be 1/3 or more blank. cf elReg's crud makeover that does this, forcing me to select 'Thread' every time I attempt to read a thread.

Return of the audio format wars and other money-making scams

By coincidence yesterday I was digging through my basement, past the boxes of VHS tapes, looking for my audio cassettes from the 1980s/1990s. I've left them in the corner of the living room to re-aclimatise before playing them into the PC.

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

Re: Needs pointing out...

Well, it did say 'In CASE of fire'. Do you think it should have been labelled 'In *EVENT* of fire'.

In case of rain, take your umberella.

In *event* of rain, open umberella and hold over head.

Either my name, my password or my soul is invalid – but which?

Why am I commenting on a thread that is eight months old? How did I not notice this thread was eight months old? How did this thread bubble up to the top of Reg's news page making me think it wasn't eight months old?

HMRC won't even accept "special" characters in the damn text fields! You have to spell out £ % - & + / in full. Won't even accept newlines, so you have to run everything in one huge paragraph like Infant School.

But an email address is the only thing that is close to 100% going to be unique to you and nobody else. JohnSmith? Millions of them. InitSurname? Millions of them. XYZyyymmdd? Thousands of them. youremail@yourdomaim? ONE. By definition.

I had to set up a user list for just 30ish people. I hadn't got past 'A' before getting a clash with almost all naming methodologies.

Re: "Wrong" email addresses

Why on earth is anybody using any sort of regex on email addresses? The only entity that knows - that is *capable* of knowing - if a particular email address is valid or not is the receiving email mailbox. This is as moronic as those sites that scream at me that my telephone number is wrong - the telephone number that is printed on my telephone right in front of me.

The ***ONLY*** testable thing you can apply to an email address is that is has a '@' in it. (I used to say exactly one '@' and at least one '.', but I have a nagging feeling something like admin@net is fully legal.)

Re: University

How about maximum length 12, must contain 16 distinct letters?

Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...

Re: Ads on the web

I'm already pay ukp2 a day for my Interwebs, job done, I've already paid.

Re: JS Bloat

ElReg is as fast as a super fast thing in web terms. Farceburk has now got to a state where not only does it kill my browser, it kills my PC! Yes, I have to fish out the top of a biro and press the little reset button.

How have these idiots skipped Lesson One in user interfaces: when the user does something, show a response ***IMMMEDIATELY*** regardless of whether anything functionally has actually happened. Otherwise the user is going to think: oh, nothing's happened, I must have mispressed, I'll try again... s*** I've just ordered 3 million pencils!

If you want a vision of the future, imagine not a boot stamping on a face, but keystroke logging on govt contractors' PCs

So how on earth does it measure the time I use reading reference material and sketching out solutions before touching fingers to keyboard?

One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

Yeah gods! If I click on a link without first checking that it doesn't lead to the Daily Mail, I'll be jugged!

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

That's the standard "year window" method that's been around since the year dot (+n). How have people been allowed out of uniMacBurgerCollege and into jobs without this having been a standard part of teaching?

Re: Wasn't this handled last time?

I think the Japanese addressing system is just a way of keeping local post offices in business, as there's usually one on every super-block with a detailed map on the wall telling you where everything is.

The moment I was walking down a street and thought to myself: "ok, cross this road and it will be Meguru 2-22" and I spotted the street post confirming I was right was the moment you pat yourself on the back and feel like a local.

Yeah, I remember the bad old days of having to reply on mapping that had rivers, roads, contours, woods, forests, canals, pylons, quarries, parks, built-up areas, tide marks, railways, bus stations, railways stations, cuttings, embankments, bridges, footpaths, bridleways, marshes, lakes, steeples, all in high contrast with colours picked to be distinct from each other at a glance. Thank god we got rid of all that.

Accused hacker Lauri Love tries to retrieve Fujitsu lappie and other gear from Britain's FBI in court

Re: Drink drive limits

And in some cases, vering unsteadily from one side of the road to the other will get you under different drink-driving limits.

How I got horizontal with a gimp and untangled his cables

Re: Forward planning

After one place I was in was cabled, I found the telephone fitters had "handily" pulled the draw strings through and not replaced them. It meant I had to rip a wall down to put the networking cable in.

Re: Electrical plumbers

Yeah. You're already paying for cheap gas to get loads of hot water, why do you want to pay more for expensive electricity to get more hot water?

Re: Office archeology

I was changing my curtains yesterday, so enthusiastically cleared out the cupboard to get to the spares - and found a cheque from Redwood Publishing from 1990 that I'd never deposited.

Re: Pictures or it didn't.......

Gender is in the mind. Padded helmet?

Re: Sucked back in

Like my last-but-one contract.

"We supply you with a $BIGCO company T-shirt to wear on site"

"What? Just the one? That's gonna get stinky"

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Re: Remember Y2K?

But two bytes gives you a 65536-year range. Shouldn't have been a problem before 67000-ish.

Hands up who reuses the same password everywhere, even with your Nest. Keep your hand up if you like being spied on by hackers

Re: 16 security cameras dotted around their home!

"I'm pretty sure my whole street doesn't have 16 cameras in it yet."

That's what they want you to think.

I accidently logged into a forum as somebody who had used my PC a couple of years ago as Firefox had remembered his details and I wasn't alert enough selecting the correct autocomplete name. After logging off I found how to clear the saved details, in going through I found loads of logon details that I had no memory of. But, most scarily, my HMRC logon details were there. Just one keypress (then Enter) would have logged you on as me.

Crypto exchange in court: It owes $190m to netizens after founder 'dies without telling anyone vault passwords'

Re: Damn.

Being curious, I went to Google and typed Bank of Ireland bank run 200 and it prompted 2008? 2000? 2005? 2007? 2006? :O

European Commission orders mass recall of creepy, leaky child-tracking smartwatch

Re: Same test results, different conclusion?

NetNanny's gone to Iceland?

Re: Tip of the Iceber

The EU political system is reminicent of Chiang Kai-shek's concept of Parliamentary democracy, where the Legislature was explicitly an arm of government and was explicitly there to create the laws the government told it to do.

Boffins debunk study claiming certain languages (cough, C, PHP, JS...) lead to more buggy code than others

Re: It's "What's the best language" all over again

Yes, but Computer Science isn't programming. What's best for programming and what's best for teaching Computer Science are different things. believe me, I suffered three years of a Computer Science degree course wondering when we were going to actually get to any actual "computing" (by which, decades later, I realised I meant "programming").

Re: strNcpy is also buggy

I go for a modification of (a). Surround the code with #ifdefs that let you incrementally refactor the code, while still being able to go backwards when it doesn't work, until you get to the point that all the old code is #ifdef'd away and you can amputate.

Yes, it does mean budgeting for the time to do the refactoring instead of just the adding of new bells, but sometimes the new bells need the refactoring to be done, and quite often the time spent doing the refactoring is made up by the reduced time in needing to understand the code to add the new features.

Re: poor tools can't be blamed?....sure, sure, suurrrrre

I once bought a claw hammer that bent in two the first time I used it. Good for them, though, when I took it back to the shop after looking at it in amazement they gave me my money back and I bought a proper hickory-handled one.

Data hackers are like toilet ninjas. This is not a clean crime, you know

Re: Arrested development?

That's why I go to the toilets via a food outlet and pick up a handful of paper napkins.

Arm wants to wrestle industry into a seat on the UK.gov's £70m hardware security train

Re: Chicken feed

Try 600m divided by 500m vs 70m divided by 60m. If you're going to argue numbers, at least do yourself the favour of starting from the right point.

Is your kid looking at GCSE in computer science? It's exam-only from 2022 – Ofqual

Re: pffft, does it matter any more? - but is it easier to learn how to program on them?

Again, that's *NOT* CompSci, that's CompEng. You're getting people to sign up to learn to drive a car, then teaching them motor mechanics.

Re: Old skool

And you're confusing IT (how to drive) with programming (how to build a car).

In today's world, *EVERYBODY* needs to learn IT, it's today's "how to drag a pen across a sheet of paper". Only those with the skills, interests and aptitudes "need" to learn programming, and will most likely do it by themselves.

But 'programming' is not 'computer science' any more than 'mechanical engineering' is 'driving'.

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

Sudd

If South Sudan renamed itself after its largest geographical feature as Sudd, and the inheritors of the Soviet Union relinquished .su, there's a simple solution.