Posts by Loud Speaker 595 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2015
If there's one design practice that MUST be followed, it's USER CHOICE
^^^^^ This, a thousand times, this.
AND
Don't ever force a change on the users.
If your "new shiney" is any good, people will switch to it when they are good and ready.
If its not good, crawl back into your basement and die - don't force it on us grumpy old farts! We have other things to think about than "where the fuck has the damned button gone this time!!!!"
A very long time ago, I arrived at Dover (from France) in a red Jaguar with white vinyl roof*, together with my very pretty girlfriend and her two friends. Just for a laugh, I was wearing a chauffeur's hat.
The customs and immigration waved us to one side, and were clearly planning to search us. My girlfriend said, loudly, and in my general direction "I don't think they know who we are!" One officer whispered to another, and the third one waved us on.
As we left, one of the friends, leaned forward from the back seat, said "I don't think we know who we are!"
* That was the fashion in those days.
I have written freeware, including for commercial organisations.
Typically, I, or my employers, want some software. I write it. It solves the immediate problem - but it needs maintenance, and solves a generic problem.
Simples, as my meerkat says (if suitably bribed), I release it as Open Source.
Other people download and use it, but they need bug fixes and/or extra features, so they provide them themselves.
One day, it becomes a major league world beating something.
Or not. See if I care.
A long time ago, my mother bought four beigels at 25p each* from a local bakers.
"There you go, four beigels £1,25" said the shop assistant
"No, four times 25 is 100" replies my mum.
"Look!" says the asistant, and proceeds to write a column:
25
25
25
25
-----
1.15
"See, numbers can't lie!"
"OK", says my mum "Give me one beigel" and hands over 25p. She then repeats this three more times, and leaves the shop.
Moral: When in Rome do as Romans do. When in thievery, do as the thieves do! (Do your own dammed accumulator next time.)
* I believe it was in the days of £sd but I modernised the story for the yoof of today.
A long time ago (1975?), I worked on the "Europeanisation" of the Xerox 800 (word processor based on the 8080).<P>
In those days, it was quite hard to get American semiconductors in Europe, so we had to replace the design at PCB level
with a locally designed equivalent.<p>
In most cases, the European design used fewer parts, which we attributed to solving problems by removing
parts while Americans solved them by adding parts.
ISO 8601 requires that the separator be a dash: 2021-12-31<p>
So that some of your SQL statements will execute the subtract signs, and others will assume the resultant number is a Unix date.This way undetectable bugs will be born intermittently, ensuring programmers will always be employed.
When SCSI first replaced SASI (about 40 years ago) I proposed disk drives with embedded SQL processors, so, instead of looking up your info via a file system, you searched for it in a database. In other words, instead of telling the drive where to look for the data, you tell it what you want, and ask it to go and find it.
Of course, this costs computing power, but if you are getting the computing power for the price of 1/2 teaspoon-full of sand (incremental cost of Risc-V) then why not use it to off load processing from your (Beowulf cluster of) mainstream CPUs? Postgresql is pretty cheap these days, as it does not need to fund any AC75 yachts. (If you need any good indexing algorithms for text, PM me - I want an AC75 for myself).
(At the time I was proposing to use an array of pipelines of Transputers, but Mrs Thatcher quietly took the Transputer round the back of the shed and shot it).
Are UK Universities using Windows? They didn't when I was a student (cos the PC had not been invented - it was all ICL mainframes).
Surely all the UK Universities could club together and produce a BSD clone for University use.
For added confusion, they could call it "University Software Distribution" or "USD" for short ;-()
If every Computer Science student had to produce a device driver ...
No, wait ....
A use that is absolutely crying out for an A3 folding "Ebook" - ie two A4 facing pages.
You can go on site with the data sheets for every possible product you can imagine, and all the components its made from, and have pages for two devices visible at once. Schematics large enough to read, etc.
One per field service engineer on the planet sounds like a reasonable market, and a
fair number will get lost/stole/broken every year.
Probably the only folding device that makes any sense at all.
Never mind thinness - what about gorilla glass and a pull out keyboard with a tracker ball in case you need to do actual engineering?
These things never understand me either.
When using Google maps, my occasionally says "Sorry, I did not understand" - but I always to my best to turn off any voice anything, because I have never
known one to work.
The most annoying is the AVR used by banks. After asking you to say a number, it repeats it back to you and rarely gets as much as one digit in three correct.
Then it asks if it was correct, and you reply "NO" it assumes that you meant "YES".
In fairness, I cannot understand a lot of Americans on TV. I only discovered what "crosswalk" means after extreme harassment from Google's reCaptcha,
and today I was told what a popsicle is. If I am going to learn another language, Spanish is higher on my list than American - and so are Shona and
Greek.
But I am OK with Glaswegians, but my grandfather grew up in Edinburgh, and I once had a Glaswegian girlfriend.
"Two factor" verification includes a typical set of predefined questions that could be answered by anyone creeping your facebook
a) you should not be using Facebook, for anything, ever
b) Never tell the truth - when they ask for "your mother's maiden name" what they actually mean is "the name of the porn star your Dad imagined he was fucking when you were conceived" (hyphenate if more than one). (Names of dogs and sheep are acceptable here).
We used IBM-compatible PCs (remember them?) running Attachmate 3270 emulator, so arguably we had a graphical display too.
Presumably with CGA - "Crap Graphics Adaptor" - I doubt IBM would have given you Herculeses.
(I wrote a 3270 emulator for the BBC Model B)
Error at or near line1, column 1
Of course, the first thing you do on powering up the board is to measure the rails.
I worked for Xerox UK in the 1970's. We had a new test rig delivered. Some military type had replaced our tradition of using colour codes to indicate the use of a wire (red = +5, black=0V, green = -5, etc) with a system in which the colour represents the revision level (pink= original, while= revision 1, etc).
The new test rig (1.5m x 1.5m x 2m high) had a wiring error (the +5 wires and 240V AC wires were switched). When switched on, all the ICs in the pie-crust (died-cast) metal boxes started popping like popcorn.
At this very moment, the alarm went for the Friday fire practice. Xerox had a very good record for evacuating rapidly. Even before evacuation was complete, the smoke was filling the room. Someone called 999 and asked for "Fire". The switchboard explained that it was a practice - they had already been notified. The staff explained to the fire brigade that there really was a fire. <this exchange continued for some time>
Fortunately, the fire was confined to the test rig, which was 2 metres from anything else.
No buildings were destroyed in conducting this experiment.
There were a number of documented cases where games had identified actual faults that the official diagnostics either did not detect or could not locate accurately. Not only were these well known to DEC engineers, but also to most customers.
In those days, the users were a relatively small number and talked amongst themselves.
[Speaking as a former designer of disk controllers, although not for DEC]
Taking the piss was the Met's strongest suit even in the 1950's*. and I am sure that anyone who was alive in London in the 1930's will fall over laughing at the idea that things were better in earlier years. Just how difficult it to stop mail bags from leaving trains without due care and attention?
* Since the Kray gang featured regularly in the Daily Mail, you would have thought the idea of arresting them could have come to an ossifer or two.
Almost all the tech websites are absolutely filled with posts complaining that the manufacturers are removing the features they want and replacing them with ones they don't want.
I won't bother doing the research for you, since you won't be paying me, but Google is your friend (ok, not your actual friend, but can help you search for things)
the cheapest private health insurance PER person is around CHF 7000 per annum!!!<P>
According to my Swiss relatives, that insurance will also cover rescuing you from the top of the Alps with helicopters if necessary, or repatriating you if you fall sick in another country - even if it requires chartering a plane. Given that Switzerland is a small country - so people travel to other countries a lot, and the population is prone to Skiing, these are substantial benefits. <p>
As I understand it, without Obamacare, even a sticking plaster could cost you CHF7000 in America, once you include "medical charges".
Being involved in data entry, I have long wondered why I could get more performance out of a PDP11/70 than a Sun Enterprise server with 32 virtual CPUs.<p>
After a careful investigation I discovered that, while a picture is allegedly worth 1,000 words, it probably consumes something closer to 64k words, and delivers the equivalent of one word. After removing all the Icons from my data entry screens, and replacing them with a single (bold) word, they now go "faster than a speeding PDP11".<p>
Icon - no you can't! (Its behind you).
a naturalised citizen, of colour and a woman to boot should show up the idiocy of our current set of politicians.
While I congratulate and thank her for doing so, in the circumstances, one would have thought that a tame guinea pig could show up the idiocy of our government.
Make her a Dame of the Empire or similar, for services to democracy and the law.
Surely an honorary LLB at the very least.
"Any place in the country" is not necessarily the solution : I, and most of my family, were unable to vote in the Brexit fiasco because we were out of the country for a family event (Wedding?)
Postal votes can be submitted early. Only my mother managed to do it - she is 90 years old and bedbound and planned a postal vote in good time. We did not bother - thinking that most people were sensible and Brexit would soon be forgotten.
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