Posts by J.G.Harston

Euro Commission gives tech firms an hour to take down terror content

What's the definition of "tech firm"? If I manage a wiki hosted on a server in the corner of my bedroom, how do I comply with "one hour" if that's when I'm at work, out shopping or walking, or even asleep?

RIP... almost: Brit high street gadget shack Maplin Electronics

Re: My life in 1976

I'm still using my Everyday Electronics resistor plastic bending tool thing.

Re: I'll miss them

Too true. In about 1985 I went to Bardwell's (remember them?) and they had baggies of pre-bent resisters and caps for a quid or so each. I bought a spread of E series and I'm still using some of them now.

Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

This dates me....

A friend had bought a 48K upgrade for a 16K Spectrum, and called me round because it wasn't working. Half the ICs were still stuck in the insulated foam. "What are these doing here?" "Oh, I thought they were spares or something."

If this laptop is so portable, where's the keyboard, huh? HUH?

+1 to that.

I need my keyboard within about six inches of my body - as that's the length of my forearms. I need my monitor about 18 inches away from my body - as that's where normal eyes focus comformtably for reading. Try doing that with a laptop.

FOUR inch floppies? What on earth system was she using?

Arrrgh! Put down the crisps! 'Ultra-processed' foods linked to cancer!

I see they've gone from "processed" - which absolutely all food is processed unless you graze in a field - to "ultra-processed" scare shock horror.

South China waters are red, Brit warships are blue, HMS Sutherland's sailing there

As long as they stay more than 12 miles from any land, in international law they have a complete absolute right of passage.

Roses are red, violets are blue, VMware's made a new vSphere for you

Never mind the story, I want to see the rest of that picture so I can see what those robots are saying to each other.

UK Home Sec Amber Rudd unveils extremism blocking tool

Re: "unnamed algorithm"

...by DAESH

That's ok, I like my extremism in english, so I go looking for ISIS.

Tax Google and Facebook for a job subsidy scheme? Sigh

That's why you need More Democracy (tm).

The problem is, most people are united in demanding *less* democracy. Our local Labour party regularly bombards the local press with letters and fills their leaflets demanding the abolition of district and parish councils, and worryingly, a lot of the public agree with them.

Web searching died the day they invented SEO

I was listening to a radio programme about mayflies the other day, and did a web image search for nymphs. Hoo! I needed a bit of a sit-down.

Uber saddles up for a new cycle of controversy

Re: Locking to railings?

I once had my fifty quid ladder stolen, the hundred-quid bolt cutters they'd used to liberate it was dumped in my garden.*

*numbers from memory, but proportions about correct.

Bring the people 'beautiful' electric car charging points, calls former transport minister

Well, it worked for Leslie Hore-Belisha.

Actually, most old residential supplies (old as in pre-war) have a 60A supply with a 100A supply fuse.

Re: And where will they be?

I had to do some overnight upgrade work in York city centre a couple of years ago. I couldn't park in the city centre for more than an hour, and the Park & Ride was closed the hours I needed to be in town. So I ended up parking in a suburban residential street and walking 40 minutes into town at 8pm and walking back at 3am.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

Plus, your finger is not transparent, so you can't actually see what you've told the tablet to point to until the wrong thing activates. When I got a tablet I immediately tried using it with a stylus, as that was the complete natural thing to do - tiny point that only obscures a couple of pixels so you can see what you;re doing. I assumed the bloody thing was broken until somebody told me that this modern crap only responds to fingers, not stylii. Look, I gave up finger painting when I was eight years old.

But this is exactly the same as starting a driving lesson with: "Ok, set off and get up to 40" and omitting all the "this is the steering wheel, this is what it does, these are the pedals, this is what they do, the process of doing A+B+C+D is called "E",",etc.

Virgin Media skulks in disused public toilets

Re: "Companies try to hide behind "Security by obscurity"

I now realise I've seen our local high pressure main, as it's buried underneath the dismantled railway line. Quite a neat way of getting across a National Park.

Death notice: Moore's Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018

People will re-learn (or more likely, learn for the first time) what *software* optimisation is, and hopefully will finally kill off the attitude of "not fast enough? get a faster CPU".

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

This is the same problem as the demands to move to energy supply provision that is all based on electricity. Currently, half of household energy consumption is via the gas mains, there is absolutely no way that can be swapped over onto the existing electricity mains on top of the existing electricity supply.

Unlocked: The hidden love note on the grave of America's first crypto power-couple

"British Elizabethan cryptographer Sir Francis Bacon"

If he was an Elizabethan cryptographer he was English not British.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

Some people have a real blind spot in understanding exactly what "synchronised" means.

"I synchronised my laptop with my desktop, then deleted the files from my laptop, and they've gone from my desktop as well!!"

Hehe, still writing code for a living? It's 2018. You could be earning x3 as a bug bounty hunter

But how do you get past the problem that employers refuse to employ you to do X unless you are already employed doing X?

France to lend Brexit Britain sore souvenir of Norman yoke – the Bayeux Tapestry

Re: Andy The Hat Dear Engleesh types

Ye Gods, you should have warned me, that link killed my browser.

UK taxman has domain typo-squatter stripped of HMRC web addresses

"nhs.uk, police.uk and mod.uk are also government sites."

No they're not. nhs.uk is the NHS, police.uk are the police, and mod.uk are the MOD. And Parliament made a very strong case that Parliament is ***NOT*** government, so shouldn't have a gov domain. Legally and constitutionally, Government is a committee of Parliament, Parliament is not a subset of Government.

"Whois allows people to find out who or what has registered a particular .com web address."

No it doesn't it allows you to find out who has registered ****ANY**** internet address.

And what bloogy stupid morons thinks the HMRC is a company?

Self-driving cars still do not exist even if we think they do

Re: They kinda do and kinda don't

Or drivers in the oncoming lane driving eyeball-melters forcing *you* to do 30mph in a 60.

mmm... 20 miles to my junction... at this speed that's... oh! squirrARARFGHHG!H!

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

Re: Sounds perfectly normal

Oh come on.

echo \x00\x0a\x00\x82 > prog

chmod +x prog

Who needs a compiler?

No wonder Marvin the robot was miserable: AI will make the rich richer – and the poor poorer

Well, by definition automation leaves poor-paying jobs behind, as you only automate a process if the automation is cheaper than the non-automation. Any business that replaces cheap workers with expensive automation goes bust.

UK.gov admits porn age checks could harm small ISPs and encourage risky online behaviour

Oh no! Boobs! and willies! And eek! what's he doing? That's the British Museum shut down.

The healing hands of customer support get an acronym: Do YOU have 'tallah-toe-big'?

Yeah gods, that video is older than I am.

Though I found myself waiting for Barbarella to arrive....

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

I'm puzzled how something that effects i86 systems also effects ARM systems. They are completely different CPUs translating completely different byte-code streams into actions.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

Re: Hmmm...

The problem with the PDP11 method is the kernel code has to do fiddly read-userland-from-kernal operations to get the call's parameters and data. If the kernal is paged in and running in kernel memory at &o004010 and the caller has its parameters in userland at &o004010 the kernal can't read them by just reading from &o004010 as that would read kernel memory, it has to use MoveFromPreviousInstructionspace (MFPI) instructions to copy the parameters to local (kernel) space, and MoveToPreviousInstructionspace (MTPI) instructions to copy stuff back to userland, such as loaded data.

UK security chief: How 'bout a tax for tech firms that are 'uncooperative' on terror content?

Re: Encryption doesn't cooperate

I'm not sure I want my online banking transactions being transmitted in plain text.

A bonus might be more face-to-face bank branches opening. Though that wouldn't have helped over the last weekend when I was juggling too many balls in the air during the Christmas-NewYear blackout.

Re: Tax Laws

I used to regularly take the Inverness to Plymouth train.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the data centre temp's delightful

Re: @Terry 6

Reminds me of my old school.

Re: Um...

I can't believe that people don't learn from history. You invite furriners into your land, what they now want this land to be annexed to their motherland?

I used to have to *walk* *to* *work* in 40 degree heat, then put on a jumper when I entered the office, then put on a coat when I entered the server room. I think those regular daily 40-15-40 might be why I'm tend to catch colds easily.

Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO

Re: Are we including mnemonics?

When I worralad it was black boys rape only young girls but virgins go without, but I more remember it as black brown richard of york gave battle mumble mumble. With E6/E12/E24 series you rarely need to know the high digits. If it's 4... it's gonna be 47, if it's 5... it's gonna be 56, etc.

'Please store the internet on this floppy disk'

Re: Brings back bad memories

"* speaking user means avoiding these phrases:"

That's the same argument as saying that to drive a car you must avoid phrases such as "steering wheel", "gears", "brake", "indicators". If they don't even the fundamental concepts of the device they're using, they really do need to put it back in the box it came in.

Re: Brings back bad memories

Yeah gods, yes. The number of times I've ended up giving up and rewritten deployment scripts from scratch so the instructions and pictures actually relate to each other.

European court: Let's not kid ourselves, Uber. You're a transport firm, not a 'digital service'

Re: So...

That *is* how taxi licensing works.

All you need for a vehicle to be licensed to carry passengers is that it passes the licensing test (basically, MOT-Plus).

All you need to operate as a driver licensed to drive a vehicle carrying passengers is for you to comply with the application requirements to be a taxi driver (in my city, basically O level English and Maths, and a local geography test, plus the legally required driving license, bankruptcy declaration and convictions declaration).

All you need to operate as a taxi control and dispatch centre is for you to comply with the application requirements to be a taxi control and dispatch centre.

Facebook: Who needs millennials? The cops love us more than ever!

A week or so ago our town Christmas tree got vandalised. Within an hour the ponkers who did it had uploaded video of themselves doing it, *with* *their* *names*. The local Plod went and yanked them.

And this was "kids" in their 20s, not teenage scroffs.

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

Re: I met him once in the late 90s.

Didn't he end up being a recipient of one of the implantable defibrillators that he invented?

PHWOAR, those noughty inks: '0.1%' named Stat of The Year

More Or Less had a look at those figures, and it ignores things like gardens and road verges and other non-built-on space associated with built-on space. It's more like 6%-10% for the whole country.

One more credit insurer abandons Maplin Electronics

They've not been a geek emporium for well over a decade.

'I knew the company was doomed after managers brawled in a biker bar'

"When elastic compute meant something different"

WTF /does/ it mean? You can't put an adjective on a verb like that, you need to use an adverb, or convert the verb into a noun by using the gerund.

A million UK homes still get crappy broadband speeds, groans Ofcom

How much of this crappy speeds is crap on the user's computer choking the life out of it. I've just spent the afternoon getting my system workable enough to get to a point where I could nuke Avast after it decided to treat my entire system as a threat. I shall be filling the free space with random numbers just to make sure.