Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Man prosecuted for posting a picture of his hobby on Facebook

Re: Laws

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 Google Home Mini: Great, right up until you want to smash it in fury

Re: They're all crap

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.

GarageBanned: Apple's music app silenced in iOS 11 iCloud blunder

Re: Let's remain calm and reasonable, people!

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.

US Congress mulls first 'hack back' revenge law. And yup, you can guess what it'll let people do

Re: Femto-poll

Who let all those cats out onto the information superhighway? There's going to be a pretty messy accident...

Re: ACDC?

...but not Breakin the Rules, sadly.

Drone smacks commercial passenger plane in Canada

Re: How is it different

@AC:

" That's whataboutism and you know it. "

Ah, but what about you getting the word "whatabouttery" wrong...?

Video games used to be an escape. Now not even they are safe from ads

When I'm playing games on my iPad, I normally just switch on flight mode before I open the app. Does the trick. But then I feel guilty about the developers....

Footie ballsup: Petition kicks off to fix 'geometrically impossible' street signs

Global rise in sea level...?

Re: Metric please

" How long is a stadia, pray? "

How long is a pieces of string?

Re: Metric please... WTF, who cares

@MyBackDoor:

" Why not just drop both of those marks and have it say "Stadium -->". "

Because it's two-and-a-quarter miles away, which is almost 20 stadia. Duh!

How much for that Belkin cable? Margin of 1,992%?

@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.

I went into a computer shop to get a USB cable as I had bought a wireless printer, which naturally didn't come with a USB cable (wireless, innit?) but needed one once for the initial setup. I was fully expecting to pay about a quarter again the price of the printer, as I didn't have time to wait for a £1 one from an Amazon trader or fleabay.

So imagine my surprise when instead of pulling out some nicely labelled oversized bag, the guy in the shop pulled a slightly battered cardboard box out from under the counter, shuffled around, pulled out a cable in cheap cellophane and asked "Will that do?"

I can't remember what he charged me for it, but he instantly became my first recommendation for computer repairs.

A) because he was honest enough that I wouldn't expect him to fleece customers

B) because he clearly had a successful enough business that he didn't feel the need to fleece customers on the day-to-day stuff.

Web uni says it will get you a tech job or your money back. So our man Kieren signed up...

Degree equivalence...?

So if the company is considered equivalent to a degree in France, why didn't they just go the whole hog and become accredited as a private university, then just issue their degrees worldwide as a distance learning institution?

Forget the 'simulated universe', say boffins, no simulator could hit the required scale

Re: Who cares - the real question is

Oh god.... you've just given me a terrible thought...

...what if the device we're being simulated on is used in a higher-dimensional episode of "Will It Blend"...?

Re: The human brain itself is a simulator of the universe

Don't you mean "there is no spoon"...?

Re: Simluator

" The simulation argument applies Occam's razor. It proposes that one of 3 things must be true, and the other two seem at least as implausible as the simulation hypothesis. "

Nope -- it's just a shoulder shrug. Just like the deity solution, it postulates the unprovable.

Testable theories can be considered secular in the traditional sense in that they only concern themselves with the mechanics of the physical realm -- most of our science originates in the secular philosophy of religious scientists.

While the simulation hypothesis is not "religious" per se, it is certainly not secular, and it's just as impossible to prove or disprove as any deity.

What is the probability of being drunk at work and also being tested? Let's find out! Correctly

Re: and in the real world

@jmch:

" in the real world, drunk guy* will just pull a sickie

somehow, it's always a guy, I've never seen a woman drunk at work "

Does not compute. If you see drunk guys at work, but never drunk women, who do you think is taking sickies again?

Commodore 64 makes a half-sized comeback

Re: I predict

That depends. If they've licensed the FPGA C64 recreation that went into a TV-game joystick unit a while back, then the engineering's all done, and there's really very little work to do.

But if they're doing software emulation, then the whole beast of timing issues and inaccurate emulation raises its ugly head.

3D selfies? What could possibly go wrong?

" Apple say there's a 1 in a million chance of it being fooled by the wrong face "

Except that of the billions of people in the world, the ones who look most like me are the ones likely to visit the same houses as me at Christmas time...

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

@ I ain't Spartacus

" eventually their tech will be beaten by some other system that consumers are happy with. "

Better tech's all well and good, but the problem with competitiveness in a modern data-driven company is that the incumbents all have a backlog of data and an embedded userbase that no-one else does.

YouTube already knows what videos I like to watch, and can hook me for hours with recommendation after recommendation. Any new competitor wouldn't be able to trap me on their site for anywhere near the same amount of time.

Google augments its processing of my words with knowledge of my history, so search results are more relevant to me. No new competitor would be able to provide me with better results than Google, even if their tech was perfect, because they're lacking that data, and short-term convenience wins.

The article points out that Uber's big advantage is this same one -- they know people's habits and they know usage patterns, and new entrants start off on the back foot as they don't have any of that.

Chairman Zuck ends would-be president Zuck's political career

No, when the puppet can talk for itself its nose grows when it lies.

Python explosion blamed on pandas

Re: Execution speed...

@AC:

" When talking about science, it is best to avoid hyperbole and exaggeration. Is python a sometimes convenient tool? Yes. Is it helpful to have iin some situations? Absolutely. Is it a "game changer"? Hell, no. "

That's every bit as strong a statement as the one you're seeking to refute.

In the early days of computer programming, most people were just scheduling batch jobs (hence "programming") using a scripting language.

The problem is, most shell scripting languages are rubbish. Most attempts at more powerful shell scripting languages (e.g. Tcl) were contorted, byzantine affairs. Javascript was clumsy to start off with, and when people tried to put it into the shell, if just felt weird.

What is often overlooked is that Python is a shell scripting language, and it manages to maintain a pretty high level of flexibility and power while still being more learner-friendly than most languages.

When people complain about its lack of speed, they're kind of missing the point, because in applications like data science, all the heavy lifting is done by libraries, which are generally compiled C code.

Python with Pandas is a bit like a massively updated version of using calling grep from a bash script.

It has changed the game.

You forgot that you hired me and now you're saying it's my fault?

Re: Ah, 'booking'

@CrazyOldCatMan

"Service Desk" really shouldn't be used as a synonym for "helpdesk".

The idea of a service desk is supposed to be that you don't need to know which number you've got to call to get someone to fix your computer/the photocopier/the coffee machine/the toilet that doesn't flush. From a business perspective, it makes a whole load of sense to have one group of people who know where to direct all calls to, because it stops the employees from wasting an entire morning trying to find out how the hell you get a particular problem resolved.

I say that as someone who's been on both sides of the phone. The last thing you want as an IT guy is to be called "service desk" (as the number of irrelevant calls goes up) and when something goes wrong in an IT company, there's more chance you'll be needing non-IT services than IT (because it's quicker to just fix an IT problem yourself than wait for a ticket to get through the call handling system).

It may seem pedantic, but I genuinely like the idea of a proper service desk, and it irritates me to know that abuse of the term leads to lack of awareness of the concept, and me having to do the constant runaround to find out who the hell deals with X, Y or Z.

Re: Powerpoint - 'boring on-screen business wank'

@DropBear

" Hey, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Don't blame the tool, blame the corporate culture full of tools who think meetings are how work gets done... "

The problem is (as Professor Emeritus Edward Tufte argues -- https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp) that PowerPoint encourages through it layout options, workflow and template structure, a certain way of working that doesn't mesh with how the human brain works. And then you get style guides and corporate templates that compound that problem.

Meetings do get work done, but the word "meeting" implies some reciprocity. The single biggest problem with PowerPoint is its fixed, linear nature. A presentation given using PowerPoint is so rigid that it removes any opportunity for anything other than superficial interaction between the presenter and the audience. It also disempowers the presenter, making him or her a slave to the slides... even if they were his or her slides in the first place.

Shock: Brit capital strips Uber of its taxi licence

Re: TAXI licence?

I don't think they were ever going to get away with calling themselves a riding-sharing service in the UK -- there was already too much regulation in place for them to skip it.

That regulation made Blablacar very cautious when they moved into the UK market, and they used the HMRC's mileage allowance as a benchmark for what is considered driving for profit or not, which was entirely sensible and ensured that Blablacar would never be profitable for drivers, and would only offset and mitigate costs.

Re: Boo hoo for Uber

People? See this is what you're missing: Uber isn't "people", it's a platform. Rules only apply to people, not platforms. Particularly disruptive ones.

Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research

Re: Still seems worth it

I know a guy who makes a good living writing software and doesn't have a CS degree. He does, however, have an astrophysics degree, and what he programs is code for space missions. I also know a woman who retired early after programming financial models and doesn't have a CS degree. She does, however, have a degree in stats and actuarial maths.

Re: Not necessarily

" you get a good code monkey, but without the knowledge of fundamentals like functional analysis, fsms, graph theory, probability and stats, etc. Not that the recent crop of "industry oriented" CS degrees do that anyway. "

AKA mortgaging the future for short-term profit.

Why did we give in to the companies and turn a degree into a 3 or 4 year training course for the first few years of employment, at the cost that now our grads don't have the skills to innovate?

A CS grad should be able to innovate and apply principles -- the goal of CS isn't to create infinite code monkeys.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

The median salary is worthless without looking at how many coders are in each sample.

If it's easier to get into coding with a degree, then our median is misleading -- because we're not including "unemployed" as a zero-salary datapoint.

UK PC prices have risen 30% in a year since the EU referendum

Re: Hmmm

" Despite the currency fluctuatiion et al, I still can't help thinking Apple, M$, Samsung etc have just used this as a bloody good excuse to increase margins and shaft UK punters at the same time. "

Well that would be a legitimate claim if it wasn't cheaper to buy Apple products in the UK that in Europe. This is particularly surprising given that they've just launched a new product range.

The base iPhone 8 costs £699 (€788) at UK RRP or €829 (£735) in Ireland. It's not a huge difference, but it's in our favour... so it seems a tiny bit paranoid to cry "price gouging"...

Re: What the CONTEXT analyst (& the article) skipped over

I think you mean what you skipped over, because the article I read specifically made a point of comparing the prices rises on continental Europe over the same period to identify the part of the UK price rise that can be attributed to currency differences.

NASA Earthonauts emerge from eight-month isolation in simulated Mars visit

Re: Makes a note ... new business idea

Amazon's Mars delivery will be hampered by the thin atmosphere, so their drones won't fly.

Facebook posts put Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli in prison as a danger to society

" Fuck over millions of sick people, that's capitalism. Threaten to pull the hair of one of the sociopaths that be*? Go in guns blazing "

Calling in bomb threats is highly disruptive, and therefore a crime even where there is no actual bomb.

The tweets in question were very similar. Any credible threat against a public figure becomes a massive cost and inconvenience to the security services. Her security detail will have to be increased as attempts to pull a hair cannot be readily distinguished from attempts to do more serious harm until it's too late; and anyone who genuinely wants to get close enough to do real harm might see the hair-grab thing as a useful smokescreen for a serious attack.

Re: Menace to society? I think not.

" Funny how nobody complained when the Chaos Computer Club were asking for DNA samples of prominent politicians. "

Were the members of the Chaos Computer Club up for bail hearings on felony charges?

This didn't happen because he was some kind of special case -- we heard about it because he's some kind of special case.

" Hey! Calling him Pharma Bro is a slap in the face to all bros everywhere. The proper term is pharmadouche. "

I find that people who refer to themselves/each other as "bros" are likely to be referred to by others as "douches" anyway.

And to localise that into en_GB, people who refer to themselves/each other as "lads" are likely to be referred to by others as "twats".

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

Re: Ped-ANT-ic typo in title

" Typo pendant spots massive ants in title! "

Where can I get a typo pendant? My girlfriend's a massive geek and always complains that I never buy her any jewellery....

Microsoft says it won't fix kernel flaw: It's not a security issue. Suuuure

Re: So since Microsoft are not concerned about the security of windows,

" Ahhh, ok ... from the EULA:

If your local law allows you to recover damages from the manufacturer or installer, or Microsoft, even though this agreement does not, you cannot recover more than you paid for the software (or up to $50 USD if you acquired the software for no charge). "

Which is equally meaningless, because if local law allows you to recover damages, it allows you to recover damages, and it's extremely rare that the damages caused will be limited to the price of the original product bought....

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

Ah, yield... generator functions are great.

A couple of years ago I was trying to do some text generation that included multiple correct solutions. As a total hack, I took my object model and added a toProlog method to each object and yes, seriously, I had part of the code convert everything to Prolog and then ran the search in Sicstus. It was a monumentally crazy hack and led to weeks of debugging. When I later realised that by shoving a yield statement and iterating on all results from the generator functions called from each function, I could do exact same thing in Python much quicker and with far fewer lines of code.

Generator functions are a good example of a core element of the Python design philosophy -- it enables you to work with datasets of virtually unlimited size, producing ad hoc code to process them.

Dolphins inspire ultrasonic attacks that pwn smartphones, cars and digital assistants

Does the boss use an HDMI adaptor to display presentations from his phone...?

Re: Why?

The key concept in the article is "non-linearity" -- in the oversimplified version, things don't act as you'd expect.

Sound does many, many funky things. If you expose a computer microphone to a sound above the frequency your computer can sample, it creates interference patterns at a lower frequency, within the audible range.

Now, if your target has active noise-cancelling circuitry, it's designed to detect and remove frequencies acting in predictable ways, and enhance short-lived sounds in the frequency range of human speech. The hack is mindboggling in the mathematics involved, but the underlying principles (lost harmonics, ghost signals etc) are all well-established.

Suffice it to say that you couldn't do this with analogue electronics -- computer processing is most definitely required.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Re: "Flat" design DOES NOT MEAN links aren't in a contrasting color. Or not in all caps.

If you read the linked article, the researchers talk about signifiers, and comment that "weak or absent signifiers" cause the problem. They also assert that flat designs tend to have a lot of weak or absent signifiers, and while they didn't attempt to prove that in the paper, I agree with them. Often the "hamburger menu" button at the top of webpages has no button-border (so the only signifier is the icon itself, hence weak) and even the search function is an unmarked clickable textarea (absent signifier) made worse by the fact that in some UIs you have to click in the text area, in other you can click in the text area or on the magnifying glass, and others still, you have to click the magnifying glass. Stronger signifiers makes this inconsistency less problematic.

Yes, flat design doesn't mean no signifiers, and 3D design doesn't always mean strong signifiers; but flat design biases away from strong signification, and pseudo-3D design biases towards strong signifiers. (Whereas true 3D design often eschews "signifiers" altogether and relies on stupid "object manipulation".

" Flat typically loads much faster "

No it doesn't. There's no software in the world that cares whether the pixels in your bitmap simulate depth or are just part of a flatshading.

3D image design doesn't mean 3D graphics.

Re: It's everywhere, but sometimes you can fix it

" The rot has even gotten to LibreOffice which installs by default its "human" interface with fugly flat monochrome icons. Doesn't look to me like it was designed for humans. "

Perhaps it's inspired by the phrase "to err is human..."?

" "3D-like" UIs were there for years. No wonder flat ones seem harder to navigate. "

That's not it. The reason 3D-like GUIs were invented in the first place was because in laboratory tests, users found them consistently easier and less confusing to navigate.

Re: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater

I think the main thing here is the conflation of flat vs 3d with abstract vs skeuomorphic.

The 3D interface was never completely skeumorphic to start off with. Sure, the buttons were skeuomorphic, because buttons in the real world stick up and then move down when you press them; but I have never had a desk where the paper was below the desk surface, which is where the 3D in Windows 95 et al placed it. Worse, look at the scroll controls in Windows -- you click "up" to move the paper down.

So the 3D interface and its success can't have been down to mimicking the real world, because it didn't.

Thus the 3D interface is not truly skeuomorphic.

The problem with 3D came in Windows XP when Microsoft made icons more 3D. Prior to that, the icons were front-on representative drawings of computers, monitors etc, with 3D implied by lighter lines on the top and left and darker lines on the bottom and right; in Windows XP, all the icons were 3D representations of the ideas with continuous graded shading that made them less iconic, lower contrast and overall harder to process.

Debating "flat vs skeuomorphic" is an oversimplification of the debate, because it conflates icons (which should generally be mostly flat, as they are symbols) with UI elements (which should generally be 3D, as it marks things out as interactive).

The problem, of course, is that this confusion is now universal, because icons in almost all settings act as buttons.

If we look at iOS, the lines are very blurry, because the fact that icons must (Apple rules) fill the rounded-corner-square, means they're visually both buttons and icons.

On Windows, icons have transparency, so they're not visually buttons. So Microsoft invented "tiles" -- i.e. flat buttons to stick your partially-transparent icons on. The name alone tells us that "flat" is a stupid interface: you interact with buttons, but tiles just sit on your wall.

On small screens....

" On small screens, a flatter UI can have some advantages because it uses less screen space (less relevant today because of high res high dpi screens). "

Actually, on small screens, 3D-effect controls are even more useful, because most small screens are now touchscreens.

One of the less-discussed benefits of the 3D button is the matter of target areas. To the user, the click target is the "top" of the button, or the inside of the check-box or radio-button. To the computer, the whole area is a valid target area.

This means that the whole area containing 3d effects becomes part of the margin for error in user clicks, and allows you to put buttons closer together without compromising the usability of the interface. This density of buttons is often visually more appealling than using blank space as padding between buttons.

When you're interacting with your finger rather than a mouse, you need a much wider margin of error, and in flat interfaces this often leads to sparseness of elements, and only the centre of the active area is marked -- the boundaries are absent. This makes it significantly easier to accidentally go over the boundary and hit the next interactive element.

For example -- the YouTube interface. Even on a medium-small device like the iPad Mini, it's not uncommon for me to accidentally press the timeline and rewind a video instead of playing/pausing it. This is pretty frustrating.

Pre-order your early-bird pre-sale product today! (Oh did we mention the shipping date has slipped AGAIN?)

Re: Kickstarter's about 99.995% bad

My one Kickstarter was the Adapteva Parallela board. An overpriced toy that I've still not done anything with, but they had the full design on display, so it was just a matter of getting the manufacturing started.

They did have an end-of-life problem with one of the components, but they managed to get a hand from a supplier, but they were serious hardware types and seemed to have good connections.

Even so, they almost didn't make it, and I see so many projects with far weaker credentials than them making far stronger claims. I'm always sceptical.

UK.gov unveils six areas to pilot full-fat fibre, and London ain't on the list

Re: London not on the list

" Perhaps this is at least one part of HMG that is aware of the feelings towards London from the rest of the country. "

It's not about "feelings towards London," though. If you are looking for economic development, you have to subsidise things that an unsubsidised market won't provide.

Piloting things in London is a total waste of money because it is the one part of the country that has the critical mass to make anything worth piloting immediately economically feasible without subsidy.

The biggest problem the UK has with money is that we are far too prone to giving people money to do things that they were always going to do anyway, and then we let them off the hook when they tell us that doing stuff in certain areas is not "commercially viable".

We experienced Windows Mixed Reality. Results: Well, mixed

First we have to get rid of those bloody flat text files.

Code is hardly more than 1-dimensional at the moment.

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

The Discworld is now scratched, as for many fans, when the needle reaches the last book, it will magically jump back to the beginning.