Re: Poor little Alice.
Well as far as careers go, that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Posts by David 132
5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
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Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'
Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS
Saturday 16th October 2021 06:16 GMT 
Re: REasoning past B....
Well, it's like the old joke about the guy who's scared of flying, because he's afraid of the plane being blown up. So he goes to see a psychiatrist, who reasons with him.
"Do you know what the odds are of there being a bomb on your plane? Very small. Less than one in a hundred thousand."
But the guy isn't convinced. "There's hundreds of thousands of flights a year, so statistically, one of those planes will have a bomb on it."
The psychiatrist thinks on this. Then inspiration strikes. "What if I told you that there was an easy thing you could do, that would reduce the odds to 1 in a million billion?" The guy is all ears. This is odds he can accept.
The psychiatrist offers his solution. "It's very simple. Next time you fly, take a bomb on board with you. The odds of there being two bombs on any given plane are 1 in a million billion..."
(Apologies to those of you who have heard this before. And by the way, never be tempted to offer this one by way of light conversation while waiting in line at an airport.)
Scoot on over for a wheely tricky mystery with an electrifying solution
Ubuntu 21.10 brings GNOME 40 debut and a focus on devs
Saturday 16th October 2021 00:12 GMT
Re: Privacy issue
Oh no, no no.
Phoning Home is creepy and invasive.
Telemetry is what modern, inclusive, diversity-embracing software does nowadays. And of course it's strictly limited to the absolute minimum necessary information - just your app version, OS version, platform, hardware BoM, software manifest, GPS coordinates, name, mother's maiden name, social security number, your shoe size, contents of your fridge, Costco membership number, your next door neighbour's pet name for his wife, and other essential data needed to improve your computing experience.
Or in the words of Bender B Rodriguez: "Blackmail? I prefer 'Extortion'. The x makes it sound cooler."
Brit builders merchant Travis Perkins opts for Oracle after ERP disaster with Infor
Microsoft's problem child, Windows 11, is here. Will you run it? Can you run it? Do you even WANT to run it?
Is it a bridge? Is it a ferry? No, it's the Newport Transporter
Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don't need petrol 'cos he runs on carrots'
Friday 1st October 2021 13:54 GMT
Re: Why now
Wanting to bounce the government into allowing them to bring in cheap drivers from Eastern Europe so as to pad their profits, BP and the Road Haulage Association thought they were being oh-so-clever "leaking" that some BP forecourts were (allegedly) having difficulty getting their supplies delivered.
Of course, these strategic geniuses failed to take into account:
1) there's a shortage of truck drivers all across Europe (~100,000 less than needed in Poland alone, from what I read last week), so it's not like there's a vast number of drivers who are queuing to come and work in the UK,
2) after 18 months of lockdown etc, people are twitchy and more nervous than usual, so it's even easier to spark panic - you don't even need to shout "fire", you just have to start sniffing and muttering "do I smell smoke?"
A large part of the problem is that the DVLA has sat on their collective arses for the last 18 months, "working from home". Which means that vital stuff like passing on drivers' details promptly to dob them in to private parking enforcement has been maintained and has met all SLAs, but the unimportant irrelevant trivial stuff like renewing HGV licences, car licences, etc, has been allowed to go hang.
So, 18 months of drivers retiring (average age of the UK's HGV driver fleet is 55+) and of no new drivers becoming qualified, and this is the result.
A proper fix would be for a) the industry to see common sense and start paying drivers a decent package (and to Boris' credit, this is pretty much what his administration is saying; they've recognized that relying on endless cheap labour from Eastern Europe to subsidize industry is NOT a good long-term strategy), and b) the seat-polishers at the DVLA to actually start working again.
I am not optimistic on (b).
Seeing as everyone loves cloud subscriptions, get ready for car-as-a-service future
Thursday 30th September 2021 11:55 GMT
Re: Too Late...
Surprisingly, no. In Ye Olde Days, it was a significant part of the car’s bill-of-materials cost to include hardware features like heated seats, so a manufacturer would obviously only fit them on vehicles where the customer would pay for them. These days, it’s often only a negligible cost - or even, cheaper - to include those hardware features in every car built (e.g. no need to maintain multiple SKUs of seats, software-remappable touchscreen controls, simplified wiring loom, etc) and charge the punter an “unlock fee” to use the stuff they already have. Tesla are masters at this.
'Extraordinary' pigs step in to protect Schiphol airport from marauding geese
Wednesday 29th September 2021 09:16 GMT
You forgot the Studebaker Hawk (and Lark, fwiw).
Oh, and of course the Reliant Robin.
I would pay good money to see a fleet of those being used for airport bird control.
Typical. Crap weather halts work on subsea fibre-optic cable between UK and France
GNOME 41: Slick with heaps of new features for users and devs – but annoyances remain
Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts
With just over two weeks to go, Microsoft punts Windows 11 to Release Preview
Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nah, it's just Windows suffering from a bit of vertigo
Ofcom swears at the general public for five days during obscenity survey
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 17:34 GMT
Re: It's "NOB" !
I believe it was,
"She dragged me all the way across London to play about the weakest practical joke since Cardinal Wolseley stood in the corridor at Hampton Court Palace with his knob out and pretended to be a door."
"(snigger)"
"Oh, shut up Baldrick. You'd laugh at a Shakespeare comedy."
From memory. Which makes me very worried.
UK Ministry of Defence apologises after Afghan interpreters' personal data exposed in email blunder
Tuesday 21st September 2021 14:27 GMT
Slight correction.
Civil Service departments closing ranks.
Regardless of the colour of the government, it's the Sir Humphreys and their Bernards that make these kind of mistakes. You don't think the Defence Minister du jour personally composed that email, do you?
But yeah. Icon regardless. Could we be any shittier to the Afghans who risked their lives to help us?
I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key
Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped
Sunday 19th September 2021 11:16 GMT
And now we have the Cloud and SaaS
And I’ve just realized why I’m so grumpy at the state of the IT industry these days.
It’s that the current headlong rush to centralise and monetise everything, nickel-and-dimeing us for every possible use of our computers (ha! “our” computers! not so much any more…) is the very antithesis of what Sir Clive offered us.
The sheer liberating freedom of my ZX81, then Spectrum+, in those sun-dappled days of the 1980s… and now, “Product Activation”. “Digital Licensing”. “DLC” and their evil misbegotten ilk.
Grrrrrr.
Apple's M1 MacBook screens are stunning – stunningly fragile and defective, that is, lawsuits allege
Wikipedia bans seven Chinese users amid concerns of 'infiltration, physical harm'
Apple emergency patches fix zero-click iMessage bug used to inject NSO spyware
Tuesday 14th September 2021 11:15 GMT
If only Apple would actually implement message filtering
A glaring gap in iOS is that it still, 12? 13? years down the line, doesn’t have any sort of iMessage/SMS filtering or whitelisting capability.
I am plagued by an incessant bombardment of crude/nasty/offensive/stupid spam texts. Apparently the scammers think my name is either Fred or Ramon. Their latest campaign consists of impersonating my carrier, with oh-so-convincing pleas along the lines of “Free message from At&t: Ramon, thanks for paying your bill, we want to give you $617.37 as a thank, please click ://dodgy-url.cn/randomstring to claim”.
Come on apple. Simple keyword filtering, that’s all I ask. There are tribes of tree-dwelling bonobos in the Congo that have figured out how to do that, I’m sure it’s not beyond the wit of a trillion-dollar tech company…
Council culture: Software test leads to absurd local planning SNAFU
Patch now? Why enterprise exploits are still partying like it's 1999
Wednesday 8th September 2021 19:19 GMT
Not my boss, he is over 80 & runs a chemical company. Slow, patient and precise is his mantra.
I would imagine that anyone fast, impatient and slapdash working in the chemical industry doesn’t usually get to finish their 3-month probationary period, let alone achieve company ownership.
(Obligatory link to FOOF, Things I Won’t Work With)
A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already
Wednesday 8th September 2021 18:56 GMT
Re: Just need earthquake and I'll have a the full house.
Ech, last year at my home we had gale force winds that blew the barn roof off onto my car, and then 12 hours later, wildfires that caused us to evacuate (house, not bowels, though the latter was close). Then ice-storms that cut power for a week and brought down half my trees. Nary a siren for any of those. To be forewarned would presumably be Un-American and contrary to the rugged pioneer spirit.
Saturday 4th September 2021 11:23 GMT
Re: Bunker
More likely it means that you’re not buying the freehold, but merely a leasehold… but with such a long remaining term on the lease (982 years) that the difference is moot (the value of a leasehold property diminishes as the lease clock ticks downwards, especially once you get under 80 years or so). And for those unfamiliar with British property terminology, “chain free” simply means that there’s no onward chain, ie the buyer doesn’t have to wait for the seller to complete their own onward move or hope that it doesn’t fall through, collapsing the whole “chain” of “I can buy your property but only if the buyer of MY property successfully sells their own property and the buyer of that one doesn’t have problems with the sale of THEIR property, etc etc..”. Basically it can be turtles all the way down.
Don't like the new Windows 11 Start or Taskbar? Don't worry – Microsoft's got your back
Apple stalls CSAM auto-scan on devices after 'feedback' from everyone on Earth
Volkswagen to stop making its best-selling product for Wolfsburg workers: VW-branded sausages
After quietly switching to slower NAND in an NVMe SSD, Western Digital promises to be a bit louder next time
Wednesday 1st September 2021 07:31 GMT
It normally - on OHV engines at least - sits between the turbo encabulator and the muffler bearings. If you’ve ever experienced your car failing to start on the first twist of the key, or jolting slightly as it up/downshifts, or seeming to use slightly more/less fuel than it used to, then this small but vital component should be your first suspect.
Trust me, am totally serious mekanik.
Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware
IBM sued again by its own sales staff: IT giant accused of going back on commission payments promise
Tuesday 31st August 2021 21:51 GMT
Re: Exeunt
IBM doesn’t seem to want any employees who are aged over 35 or based in high-wage Western countries, so I’m sure they’re not that bothered. I’m also sure it’ll work out very badly for them in the long term as they continue their glide-path into utter irrelevance, increasingly trading on their name and long-passed reputation, but hey, by then the CxOs responsible will have retired and it won’t be their problem.
Rumors of satellite-comms-capable iPhone abound. The truth could be rather boring
Tuesday 31st August 2021 04:15 GMT
Inclusive-Or
“The phone will ask what kind of emergency is happening, such as whether it involves a car, boat, plane or fire,”
"So, err.. a light aircraft crashed onto my car and pushed it off the edge of the marina, where it hit a boat and the whole lot caught fire... what option do I select???"
When you finish celebrating Linux turning 30, try new Linux 5.14, says Linus Torvalds
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