* Posts by Pompous Git

3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014

Please, pleeeease let me ban Kaspersky Lab from US govt PCs – senator

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"She's just the tip tit of the iceberg in CongressLand."
FTFY...

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I would have thought...

The NSA was a greater security risk than Kaspersky.

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

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Nobody's mentioned Mark Pilgrim's...

... Dive Into Accessibility.

"This [free] book answers two questions. The first question is "Why should I make my web site more accessible?" If you do not have a web site, this book is not for you. The second question is "How can I make my web site more accessible?" If you are not convinced by the first answer, you will not be interested in the second."

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"Get a real video card!"
I did — a Radeon RX 550. My gaming is confined to Civ 6 so it's more than adequate. Funny thing though is that the instruction manual describes a completely different interface for installing the provided driver/software. Go figure...

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Re: Bill Gates....

"The "improvements" (MS Word "ribbon", flat UI) got Microsoft billions of dollars of licence revenue."
I think Addintools might have made a few quid.... Quite a few held off and stuck with Office 2007.

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Re: At the AC, re: polls.

"I like to answer polls. I give answers that will skew the results & make anyone reading my answers scratch their head & wonder WTF."
The Gitling purchased a game for me that I'm having a problem with. In order to get support, I was asked "What's your favourite animal? We really want to know." So I responded: "Alan Price".

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Re: Personally

"Ahem:- polls *can't* account for people like me who refuse to take part in polls, they can only assume a pattern of behaviour and/or beliefs for people who refuse to participate."
Oh dear, you don't really think that refusing to participate in a poll doesn't generate information for the poll do you? Yes, you are counted as a non-participant. Yes, you are the error bar. The percentage of refusals is very useful information indeed. Well-designed polls have a very low refusal rate.

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Trollface

Re: Isn't slower navigation BETTER for web site owners?

"While pondering usability why not read up on ALL CAPS vs normal case legibility and perception?"
It could be worse JLV. BB could be using underlined lower case ;-)

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Re: based on 71 users

"But what strikes me about this whole thing is that nobody did any such study, before flat design became popular."
Actually they did. When the web started it was all flat. When 3D elements became available studies were done. Not just on 3D, but all aspects of web page design. Mostly ignored by so-called web page "designers", but there are examples of excellence. The Google home page and Amazon for instance.

There's an aspect to this that Neilson probably took into account. While a person browsing the web when it was new would invest some time, today with so much choice a page that frustrates through design will send users looking for something easier to use. One thing that pisses me off royally are websites that I must use where I end up going around in circles looking for what I need.

Asteroid Florence buzzes Earth, brings two moons along for the ride

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Re: An Asteroid named Florence

"Being wiped out by something called Florence would be just sooooo humiliating."
Oh I dunno,; we'd just be going with the Flo' as it were. In any event, Ms Nightingale's a bit of .a heroine to those of us who like our statistics

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"Most of these asteroids look like potatoes to me."
So perhaps Irish, or South American then...

Hubble Space Telescope spies possibility of liquid water in TRAPPIST-1

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Re: @Pascal

"... if silicon-based life were possible, we should find some on earth."
As my geology lecturer pointed out in his introduction, we know quite a lot about the top two metres or so of planet Earth. Below that, almost nothing. Not so long ago Tommy Gold's hypothesis that we would find life many kilometres deep in Earth's crust was scoffed at. Then somebody actually looked...

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Re: @Pascal

"Read my post again. Silanes are limited to Si-Si bonds. The problem with using silicon as a structural element in life is that it doesn't form the Si=Si and triple bonds that enable the formation of compounds suitable for synthesising the equivalent of proteins and information carriers like DNA. "
Silanes are most definitely not limited to Si-Si bonds. See:

Researchers take small step toward silicon-based life

You are assuming that Si double and triple bonds are necessary components of a replicant system that reverses entropy. As I pointed out in my earlier post, we might not recognise a lifeform based on an alternative chemistry.

"The opinion of scientists who died around 50 years ago really isn't relevant to our current understanding in most fields."
Really?

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Re: @Pascal

"By contrast, the only other 4-valent non metal (silicon) doesn't display anything like the ability to form chains."
You've not heard of silanes then? They are the equivalent of alkanes. Then there are silicones, alternating chains of Si and O; where would women be without them? And then there are the polysilanols, silicon compounds corresponding to sugars. They are soluble in liquid nitrogen so they could play a role in very low temperature biochemistry. AFAICT there's no scientific Law against biochemistry at temperatures not normally experienced on Earth.

The great evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane thought that at very high temperatures, silicon-based life was more likely.

"silicon hasn't been directly used in anything with living processes. "
Now that's utter tosh! Rhodothermus marinus has been genetically engineered "to form carbon-silicon bonds across a range of conditions and substrates".

See: Bringing carbon-silicon bonds to life

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Re: Progress

"At the current rate of progress I confidently expect to see film of little green men and women cavorting in their back yards before my demise."
Some years ago I had a domain registered with GoDaddy. When it came time to renew, they never reminded me (unlike NetSol) and it was purchased by a squatter who wanted big dollars I didn't have for its return. People expecting to find stories about the village called Franklin in Southern Tasmania were confronted instead with little green men having sex, not with little green women, but standard issue Earthling women. Whoda thunkit? I guess you missed it...

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Re: @Pascal

"But I do think we should keep a much more open mind about what we define as 'life'. "
The problem there is that the next most likely candidate as a basis for life is silicon and its oxide is a solid that's not very soluble in water. If a Si based lifeform does exist, we are not likely to recognise it.

A big ask for any nerd, but going outside (your usual data sets) can be good for you

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Re: Gave me a laugh

"Pretending that this is in anyway scientific or that the stats mean what you think they mean or that they are even comparable."
So what do you suggest? Ouija boards, reading sheep entrails, crystal balls, navel-gazing?

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"Unsurprisingly the raft of data available from the US government (http://data.gov/) would keep the nerdiest number-cruncher occupied for longer than is strictly healthy."
Er... d'you think that's what caused me to get congestive heart failure?

Big Tech slams Trump on plan to deport kids

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Re: DACA bad. MAGA good.

"The man does not have a racist bone in his body."
I would have thought refusing to rent apartments to negroes and Puerto Ricans was pretty racist.

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"Your point?"
I find it difficult to think of them as immigrants. How long do you need to live somewhere before you are no longer a furriner? YMMV. I do recall a line from a documentary: "They fought for a land that they thought was theirs."

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Re: OBAKA

"Thanks to Trump (and blind supporters like you), the US is no longer trusted by anyone."
The loss of trust began decades ago. For example, LBJ claimed (correctly, cough, cough) that the US had no intention of bombing Cambodia. That's because the US was already bombing the crap out of Cambodia. It was a gift to the communist party there who had no problem recruiting as a result. Five million dead at the hands of Pol Pot, or was it really at the hands of the good ol' USA?

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Re: Not quite.

"They did not sneak into the country, they happened to be born there or were brought there by their parents at a very young age. They did not choose to illegally enter the US."
So just deport the parents then...

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"I have never understood America's xenophobia and attitude towards immigrants and foreigners, when you consider the entire country consists of immigrants and foreigners."
You've never come across the term "American Indians" then? Buffy Sainte-Marie, or Link Wray for example.

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"Microsoft president Brad Smith penned a blog post warning that "these changes would not only negatively impact thousands of hardworking people across the United States, but will be a step backwards for our entire nation."

CEO Satya Nadella wrote on his LinkedIn page: "We care deeply about the DREAMers who work at Microsoft and fully support them. We will always stand for diversity and economic opportunity for everyone. It is core to who we are at Microsoft and I believe it is core to what America is.""

Well if Brad Smith and Satya Nadella say so, who are we plebs to argue?

User thanked IT department for fast new server, but it had never left its box

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Re: You can't reliably clean malware

"I had one once that had 679 actual examples of (il)legitiment malware"
I recently was given a teenager's lappy to fix and it had something of that order of malware. It went from needing more than 5 minutes to boot to less than a minute after being disinfected. I did it in return for a mate fixing our stove that would otherwise have cost us north of $AU10,000 to replace.

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Re: A couch?!

"Colonials prefer a davenport"
From the OED: "A kind of small ornamental writing-table or escritoire fitted with drawers, etc."

Well I can assure you that here in the Land of Under, we don't fucking well sit on escritoires, fitted with drawers or without. We sit on a lounge, sofa or armchair in the lounge room.

'Open and accessible' spambot server leaks 711 million records

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Re: Apparently I have been PWND

"Fuck Off and Have A Nice Day"
As it happens, Mr Hunt told me when Adobe revealed my email address and password to all and sundry. Not Adobe. Not you, but then you're obviously a twunt who'd not do what Mr Hunt does. For free. So he gets some of my hard-earned. If I'm ever unlucky enough to be in the same room as you, then I might pay you to leave, but don't bet on that.

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Re: have i been pwned?

"I have an Adobe account wth???"
Adobe have required that for using their software for quite some time now.

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have i been pwned?

Worth subscribing to. It's the sixth time my details have been pwned...

';--have i been pwned?

Police deny Notting Hill Carnival face recog tech led to wrongful arrest

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" I have black people in my family and they have never attacked the police, stabbed or gang raped anyone or each other."
But have they ever been arrested for...

littering?

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Devil

"arrests per thousand attendees are higher at Glastonbury than at Notting Hill"
That would seem to imply that there's a need for affirmative action and that plod should be praised for concentrating more effort on Notting Hill in order to correct the disparity.

Couple fires sueball at Amazon over faulty solar eclipse-viewing goggles

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Re: Site for sore eyes.

"Amazon are useless at clearing out the obviously fake stuff from their site, even if you report it.... The comments are telling..."
" Obviously some purchasers have shit for brains. I always read the comments before deciding whether to purchase, not after!

Pacemaker patch passes probe by US watchdog

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Linux

Re: Risk?

"t may be there is a tiny risk, if you are female, 6ft tall and of Asian decent"
But that's because the device and its control system are Linux-based. If it was Windows everyone would be at risk.

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Re: St Jude?

"The patron saint of hopeless cases?"
Saint Jude is the patron saint of the Chicago Police Department...

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Re: Risk?

"And what if someone has rooted their pacemaker to speed it up during rumpy-pumpy?"
That reads rather oddly in the Australian vernacular. Rooted = fucked!

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Re: If I stop posting...

Thanks Korev. Given the procedure is at the Royal Hobart Hospital Habattoir I might need it!

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If I stop posting...

... after the 24th of October, you may assume the patch killed me.

Turnbull's Transformers lash government IT mavens over spend

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"using SAP as a wrapper around the old windows wrapper which wraps the old DOS system"

Centrelink run an IBM Model 204 database management system first used commercially in 1972. DOS wasn't even a twinkle in 14 yr old BillG's eyes back then.

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

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Re: 3700 year ago ... and before then?

"GR and QM were pretty much invented overnight"
From a geological perspective... I think we can date the beginning of humans thinking quantitatively from a time before 3,700 years BP.

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Re: Bah!

"There are 21 individual names for numbers between 0 and 20."
You forgot two of a dozen, score, or twelvty.

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Pint

Re: Special cases

""Some Of His Children Are Having Trouble Over Algebra""
Better:

Smiles Of Happiness

Come After Having

Tankards Of Ale!!!

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Re: Copyright and Mathematical Tables

"What if the publisher of a set of mathematical tables incorporated deliberate errors to allow easy spotting of plagiarism?"
The preface to my Chambers' mathematical tables states there are known errors that would trap any plagiarism. The errors are presumably in the last decimal place and consequently unlikely to prove problematic.

The book's in storage but would be forty years old at least.

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Re: Gilgamesh sued Apple

"All the references are considerably later, and have a strong whiff of myth about them."
More accurately, there are few references because not much writing has survived from the period. The heroic poem Y Gododdin is dated to anywhere between the 7th and 11th Century and that mentions Arthur only in passing. None of the sources are at all reliable of course. I sometimes wonder what future historians will make of today when they pore over fragments of The Grauniad, and The Daily Fail.

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Re: beer for boffins

new math by tom lehrer

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"For some applications, that's not entirely true anymore. Multi-Level Cells in FLASH are not 1 or 0, there's several inbetween..."
You are of course correct; I was being a bit glib. In truth we have found quite a few uses for multivalent logics in recent time so we are moving away from binary logic rather than towards it. William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347) did a bit of work on trivalent logic without finding a use for it. Probably too busy counting angels on pinheads and neglecting to write down the results.

Uncle Sam outlines evidence against British security whiz Hutchins

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"Ok, this is starting to sound like I have a bit of a grudge against lying scumbagscoppers!"
Quite understandable. I wish I could say otherwise, but my son was treated by them very badly. Never charged with anything after I was told by a detective that I would be utterly disgusted by what he'd done when he was charged. Eventually I received an abject apology from the chief detective who told me there was no evidence that The Gitling had been anything other than an exemplary citizen.

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Re: Don't get it why

"You've never heard of Halons razor have you?"
Nope. I do possess a bottle of carbon tetrachloride though I've never seen it shave.

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"the realisation that the rest of the world increasingly views America as an aggressive bully?"
Some are slow on the uptake... The United States accused Habib of many crimes that he confessed to under torture over a period of three years. There was never any evidence to support US claims and Habib was eventually released without charges in January 2005.

Mamdouh Habib

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Re: Don't get it why

"There are many hackers out there, that the NSA knows about, but all they want to target is the person who secured the day when they couldn't wouldn't."
NSA already knew about the kill switch since they wrote the malware.

Is it possible to control Amazon Alexa, Google Now using inaudible commands? Absolutely

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Re: Amazon now?

"All delivered by drone of course."
Presumably on credit. Then you get the demand to pay up in 24 hours or have your kneecaps rearranged.