Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Betty Boop and other cartoons of the era were targeted at adults. A lot of it was about bending adult expectations of reality, and was at best indecipherable to kids, at worst nightmare-inducing (and I think the Pink Elephants On Parade sequence in Dumbo was inappropriate for kids, harking back to the days when cartoons were a pre-feature item at adult cinema).
" "if there's anyone who can make it work, it's Apple."
The Apple that possessed that sort of magic stopped existing a few years back. "
Not necessarily. The ace up Apple's sleeve has been their mostly successful attempts to retain control of look-and-feel in iOS app UIs. The problem UWP faced was the fact that it was something new, and Windows already has layer upon layer of UI cruft -- how many different load/save dialogues are there in the Windows 10 interface for legacy support, for example? Windows never abstracted the APIs enough away from presentation that they could be considered interchangeable.
iOS, on the other hand, was built ground-up on the philosophy "when we change, you change" and "if you don't do it our way, your apps will break. Apple refused to repeat the legacy trap that haunts Windows (and MacOS, to a certain extent) which means they now have an established platform and ecosystem with a high degree of future-proofing. iOS apps that don't rely on specific hardware configurations are already a cat's whisker from being MacOS apps, and it wouldn't be all that hard to rewrite the APIs for non-touch.
" So behave yourself. You are under observation. "
Oh dammit! What we didn't want was everyone acting as though they're being watched. Have you never heard of the observer's paradox?
Bugger it all -- the experiment's a bust. Might as well put the whole planet in the autoclave and restart from scratch.
I'm never going to finish my BSc at this rate....
@Haku
" I've still got it somewhere, along with an Opus Discovery disc drive that allowed the ZX Spectrum to use 3.5" floppy discs as if they were Microdrive cartridges if memory serves me right (sometimes it doesn't, I think I'm getting old). "
I think all of us who remember Spectrums are getting old....
" It is always safer to call a Lecturer "Professor" then to accidentally call a Professor "Lecturer" or "Instructor." Most people address faculty as "Doctor" just to be safe as well. "
In most of the universities I've studied or worked in, people tend to call teaching staff by their names.
@Cipherpunk:
" Professor is a job title, not a degree. There was nothing improper. "
True. However, in the American system, it's synonymous with "lecturer", whereas in the UK it is reserved for the academics at the top of the tree, and once you become a prof, you are always a prof, just you become a "professor emeritus/emerita" once you're no longer in post. You'll be expected to go back to your old university every now and then to lecture, and to supervise the occasional masters or PhD student, so you never fully retire.
@Yet Another Anonymous Coward
[ Re: pursuing compensation for the emergency services. ]
" What's the cut-off? "
I would say that performing a stunt in a professional capacity without a completed form signed by a suitably qualified risk-assessor and without the requisite safety equipment on-site is already illegal. And not warning the emergency services and/or the local council in advance of a potentially dangerous stunt too... but as the notification would have needed to include a risk assessment form, they wouldn't have been able to do that anyway.
The problem here is the way the so-called "gig-economy" takes amateurs and pays them, but still treats them as amateurs.
Sunday-league football, skiing, skydiving and cycling are mostly amateur affairs. Professional sports, on the other hand, are generally expected to have medical and crowd-control staff on-site, and are generally expected to pay for that.
Road racing on open roads is illegal, so I'll assume you're referring to closed-road events, where the organiser is again responsible for maintaining suitable response provision just in case there's an accident.
Rocket-powered cars for TV... well, again, TV has health-and-safety obligations. However, I do believe it's a bit of a different question whether you're talking about a competent professional racer like Guy Martin or a hyperactive middle-aged-"lad" TV-presenter like Richard Hammond. Top Gear was highly irresponsible letting Hammond go in that thing, and really the show should have been closed down permanently at that point.
The purpose of the research was to inform other research that says "Language X is the most popular language (according to Github)." Analysing Github for patterns that bias other research is completely valid, and identifying patterns is part of that.
This is perfectly scientific, and in fact continuing with their original plan would have been the statistically worthless option, as modified file copies are at least an order of magnitude less common than verbatim file copies. The originally sought data would be valueless without this file-level data, so there was no point in pursuing the original plan.
" ...people have done calculations and you would have to run an intensive at full belt for about 10 hours solid for it to be an issue. "
No, it's not only an issue when it runs out during plugged-in use, it's an issue as soon as you unplug with the intent to use it on the go, but find it's got no bloody battery left.
People expect laptops to be at a higher state of charge when you unplug them than they were when you plugged them in.
So... problem.
" You come down to earth and realise it's a religious statue, no one's likely to deliberately make a rude statue in church grounds and you simply need to grow up a little bit and see it for what it really is, just a statue. "
It's for a school. Yes, the people looking at it and seeing it as rude need to grow up -- that's why they're called "children".
" No, that's a plain dependency. There's nothing recommended about them. If something requires a dependency to install, it will be automatically selected. And that method isn't restricted to the Debian-esques... it's a method use by all distros."
Did you read the article? It clearly points out that the issue arises because Debian installs recommended packages silently out-of-the-box. You have to specifically configure it not to do that. You can criticise the OS makers for their choice, but "recommend" is semantic metadata, and I don't think there's any specific suggested action.
" Debian user Felicia Hummel installed a package called "cowsay", [...]. But with default settings of "install suggests" enabled, a controversial second "recommends" package called "cowsay-off" was also installed. "
" Smartphones do more or less the same thing. Does anyone have a killer app that can only be used on one OS? "
How about "all the apps that I've already bought and don't want to have to pay for replacements for"?
For several iterations, iOS was the best option for video and realtime audio, because the abstraction layer in Android made syncing massively problematic. Even a simple drumkit app in Android could be useless because of the unpredictable lag between the user's finger making physical contact with a hotzone and the device playing the sound, which would differ across devices.
Major audio software and hardware producers refused to support Android because they didn't want the blame for the OS's weaknesses.
Now that's a thing that's firmly in the past, and all major audio device manufacturers support both platforms, but it has left me very dubious about Android support even this far on. (Plus, I'm tooled up with iOS apps, as I say, so I'm reluctant to leave the ecosystem and start afresh...)
" It's more worrying that people presumed to be logical ( as in techie minded) don't see that. "
While at a transistor level, computers are about logic, everything above that level is a baffling mess of arbitrary decisions, and any minor variation results in complete failure.
If PEBCAK was an assembler opcode....
Indeed, and that is why they came up with the notion of the generic service desk that logs calls for every IT problem as well as all facilities problems from a broken coffee machine to a crack in a supporting wall.
There are two problems that have crippled the notion of "service desk":
1) A truly generic service desk rarely resolves problems on first call, which irritates some users and looks bad against a key performance metric of the services it replaces: calls resolved on first contact.
2) Many companies create their service desks by simply rebranding the IT helpdesk; giving them extra work and no extra staff. This leads to a longer backlog of calls, and it's the desk staff that get it in the neck, as their performance goes down against key performance metrics... including calls resolved on first contact as while they can reset user passwords online, they can't exactly unblock the third stall on the right in the gents lavs over a phone call....
So yeah... service desk is a dream. I'm sad to live in reality.
" The one true doughnut is an irregular globular shape and filled with jam and covered in sugar. All others are impostors. After all, it's called a doughnut, not a doughring. "
Go grab a metal bolt, and that metal thing that goes on it... what do you call it? A sort of ring thing, with a hole in the middle? Oh yes, a nut.
(I'm well aware that this is false etymology, but then again I'm pretty certain that the original doughnuts were unstuffed fried doughballs not much bigger in size than a modern "doughnut hole".
I think the best way to think about the offence taken by religious people is this:
How would you feel if this was your mother?
I mean, even if there is no god (I'm an atheist myself), religious people genuinely feel filial love for their figures of veneration. Thus, think about whether you would insult someone's mother that way.
Now before anyone says "it's a delusional feeling", well yeah... I personally agree with you, but it makes no difference: they feel it, and making them offended doesn't free them of the belief -- it just offends them. So what is the purpose?
So let's get back to the sausage roll.
If someone replaced my mother with a sausage roll, how offended would I be? Not very. Unless it was presented explicitly as an insult. So I do think it's a bit of a silly overreaction, but guess what...? A handful of Twitter users is nothing. You're talking about the overreaction by a tiny number of people... so aren't we also guilty of overreacting.
@Big John,
There certainly is some quality journalism left, but you can see how quickly it has been forced to move towards clickbait-ism to compete with the fake news crowd.
I suspect most journalists would be very pleased with reductions in clickbait, as right now they're all being forced to dumb down and would like to be able to do more good stuff.
Funny this comment should pop up today, because while I'm not having a server room problem, I discovered last night that the cleaners are storing waste paper in a fire equipment cupboard at my current workplace.
I have logged this with the very top of our "security and safety" department, alongside a lecture theatre with both fire exits blocked during exam sittings.
Not a happy bunny today.
I wish people would stop talking about bacon. I'm living in a country where it's not illegal to eat pork products, but as most of the country doesn't, almost nowhere sells bacon. Certainly nowhere in my town. :-(
Although that said, what I'm missing most at the moment is a toaster and sliced pan bread.
" Also, that's too hot for a good fried egg. "
Erm... no.
The 67 degrees C mentioned on the Guardian article is for sous-vide cooking, and it takes aaaaaaaaaaaages. Sous-vide is a deliberately low-temperature cooking style. I imagine most people actually frying their eggs will be using a notably higher temperature.
(I suspect most folk would say I fry my eggs at too high a temperature anyway...)
It gets worse.
A lot of people don't change the codes very often, and the action behind keys that are used most tends to soften fairly quickly. There have been times where I've forgotten the combination to a room/building and reminded myself by just prodding all the buttons until I find the soggiest ones, which then let me in. Scarily weak security.
As I've just commented elsewhere in this thread, it's more complicated than that.
In the past, Scotland hasn't always done enough to counter the glorification of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland (and a disproportionate amount of what was traditionally done was against pro-republicans, while Rangers fans were still happily waving UVF banners at matches with impunity).
There's good reason to worry about people posing for pictures in "black combat gear", and I don't have a problem with them investigating when an image like that is presented to them. The problem here is that they didn't drop it as soon as they discovered it was someone playing a game of tig.
But the glorification of the Norn Irn situation has been a major societal problem for decades, even if mostly concentrated in Glasgow, and while the law is clearly overbroad, there is still a need to be able to stop genuine glorification of terrorist violence.
Oh, and politics comes into it to, because sectarianism has historically influenced all sorts of things, through HR hiring policies to party candidate nominations.
Don't get me wrong, I do think the law here is a mistake, and that the police officers involved acted like total muppets, but I do recognise that we have to look beyond that and look at the whole thing in context.
In this case, I suspect it all arises from the glorification of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland by a subset of residents of the greater Glasgow area -- it's an issue that hasn't always been tackled as strongly as it should have, but there is always a danger of overcompensating as we can see here.
The description of the picture as "black combat gear" brings it into the realms of possibility that this did look a lot like a republican or unionist paramilitary. But then again, Grangemouth isn't in greater Glasgow.
All in all, while the plods in question can be excused for flagging up the image for further investigation, the fact that their superiors saw fit to push for charges rather than dropping it is just ludicrous.
The problem is that we've spent a heck of a lot of time on natural speech recognition, which overcomplicates matters ridiculously.
With our inefficient GUIs we've trained people out of the idea of learning "commands", and when it boils down to it, every speech recognition interface has some kind of assumptions coded into it that mean we really are dealing with a command set, but a fuzzy one, and one that isn't written down anywhere.
OK, so Google will give you a rough overview of the command structure if you make a mistake, but only if you make a mistake that it recognises (such as it working out that Keiran was trying to make a call) and that it recognises as a mistake (it didn't realise it was phoning the wrong person, for example).
I genuinely think people are open to a formalised compromise.
I mean:
OK Google, Call [[person]] using [[application]]
seems straightforward, and quick. Getting rid of the "I would like to ..." part sets everything up for a straightforward paradigm.
OK Google, Switch on the [[device]] in [[room]]
And sticking with a fairly simple formula, you can get a reasonable degree of sophistication:
OK Google, open The Register in Chrome and display on the TV in the living room.
It's a strict subset of English, so easily learnable, and if you include a few clear variations (e.g. OK Google, use Chrome to open The Register on the living room TV), no-one's really going to notice that they're not able to say it every which way, because they'll get what they want done easily and quickly enough.
You can use Garageband as a simple multitrack, if you want, and given that it's free with any iOS device, if you need a multitrack recorder, why not use it? (In fact, the original Garageband was pretty much just a multitrack with a couple of extra functions!)
Garageband is definitely not mutually incompatible with real instruments.
@wyatt
" To an extent I agree, however when you look at how the cable is comprised there can be a number of differences. Quality of the connectors and the gauge of the wire are all factors which a cheap cable may scrimp on meaning slower charge times and other issues. "
The problem is that many pricey cables in shops are just cheap cables in a nice packet.
The only objective measure of USB cable quality is resistance on the +5V line -- a poor cable will have a higher resistance, meaning slower charging. Funnily enough, even though I own a multimeter, I've never checked my cables for this... must start doing so.
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