Wrecked again
"Wrecked again, I'm out on the highway,
"Wrecked again, I'm trying to find Huawei
"To you."
— With apologies to Michael Chapman.
2023 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2016
I will never pay for a parcel at a post office ever again. Pre-pay via a comparison site (say ParcelMonkey) costs less than half as much for exactly the same service, and that's before taking off the broker's commission. Just print the label, hand over and they scan-and-send. Even the Parcel Post web site charges the full price for its pre-pay service.
What a bit of luck. The first object to be given a double-barrelled name in advance turns out to be a double object.
The chances against that must be, er, astronomical. >ducks for cover<
Naming them individually "Ultima" and "Thule" is not so much unimaginative as grabbing the moment to set an archetypal precedent. I only wish there were a double-beer icon here.
Replicants are not AI as we struggle to create it today, they are biologically engineered - eyeballs being a case in point. Listen too to the dialogue between creator and creation over the way that the engineering of these supermen has led to an (admittedly convenient) un-fixable drastic reduction in lifespan. They are not AI as the article claims, they are supermen. The same applies to the artificial pets (nod to the forgotten owl, here). Given the current bleeding-edge work on athletic performance enhancements, neural stem cell implants, genetics and whatnot, we may perhaps create replicants before we can achieve true AI.
WordPerfect was the original dominant wordprocessor on MS Windows, taking over the marketplace from the older WordStar on MSDOS. It was famous for its "reveal codes" feature which gave you an editable view of the raw ASCII document code. Magic! Rather than make a better product themselves, MS indulged in their usual hated tactics to oust WordPerfect and force their own Word on everybody, and from that grow an office suite to oust Lotus 1-2-3 etc. Corel bought the failing WordPerfect and, bless their cotton socks, kept it on life support until it regained a semblance of consciousness.
Meanwhile, Corel Draw was falling victim to Adobe's equally disreputable selling of their Sh*tware. Xara was a blazlingly fast and easy to use up-and-coming competitor to on Acorn's RISC OS/Archimedes. As the ARM-based OS fell from favour, so too did Xara's sales. They offered their UI to Inkscape, hoping to do a tie-in with Inkscape as the free version and Xara as the much faster pay-for version, but in the end all it did was improve Inkscape no end. Instead, Xara was bought up by Corel, who used its algorithms and UI to refresh Corel Draw. Hats off to the Xara team and RISC OS for the colour picker we have all used to death ever since.
I am amazed and delighted that Corel have the cash to buy anything any more.
"This was just an unfortunate accident. We wanted to draw out the common sequence of breaking wind, in which there is little DNA, followed shortly by a number two, in which there is plenty. They can feel a lot the same while they are on the way, and sometimes even arrive almost simultaneously. So we searched online for an image of a "fart or trump" and photoshopped it onto the end of a faecal stool. We had absolutely no idea that the image bore the slightest resemblance to our esteemed President, this has come as big a shock to us as to everybody else. Now, can we please keep our jobs, Your Honour?"
"Bulk surveillance is recording every beach, all the time, and then being able to do a search at some point for where you have been. See the difference?"
Oh, you mean like security cameras in shopping areas? The ones they trawl back through to catch paedophiles, rapists and terrorists?
No, I don't see the difference, or at least, not that difference. (I noted a different difference already - got that?)
There is and there isn't.
First, let's include commercial spying, aka data harvesting, in the mix. What "right to privacy" applies to NSA and GCHQ that does not apply to Facebook and Google?
Next there is the POPD - Plain Old Physical Domain. What "right to privacy" does online trawling breach, that a telescope on a pier above a crowded beach does not?
And what "right to privacy" should override the right not to get abused by a paedophile, rapist or terrorist?
I am not saying there are no such rights (for example trawling the 'net often reveals an ID that the telescope seldom does), but I am saying that a lot of BS is spouted by rights activists.
Company I was with had a helldesk system just like that. Problem was, sales were falling because the printer in the sales dept had been borked for so long.
I was asked to take the desk over, fit it into my spare moments, so I did the job properly. A couple of months later sales are back up again. But management decides I am "spending too much of your valuable time" on it, a euphemism for my once-weekly round-robin status emails, which were embarrassing said managers for not getting things done.
So it gets passed back to a secretary who could teach the PFY a thing or two. Couple more months and it is back to square one.
Yeah, but we have so much legacy flash/office stuff that our business depends on, we cannot just turn it all off.
We are too dumb to plan migration to a secure policy. We just have to learn and not do it again. This time we really will learn, we really believe that.
Except, we are still as dumb as Charlie Brown when it comes to being suckered one more time.
BTW, it's spelled AUGH!
The regular hydrogen nucleus is just one positively-charged proton.
The innermost electron orbital around it, known as the S, has room for two negatively-charged electrons.
H+ has no electrons and is just a proton.
H has one electron and a neutral electric charge.
H− has two electrons, and is stable because they fill the S orbital so nicely.
So, if there is no driver giving signs of life, how the feck does the car manage to carry right on as if there is?
@Elonmusk: The default behaviour is not happening. That is a bug the size of an elephant. Look into it, or get cuffed when the court case that notices your failure to do so comes up.
"So I unplugged the network and took pictures of the screen with my phone."
Used to use an old Polaroid instant film camera with special adapter hood.
Sysadmin went nuts. "Not what we are here for" blah blah.
But he insisted on being the only one who could set up network connections, because self-promotion security. He was a backroom admin, not routinely allowed on customer premises, so we explained that it was the only non-network option available and told him we needed a consistent presentation style in our reports (Pritt stick and photocopier).
After a bit he came back whining about digital backups. "OK, if you want to scan and archive everything, the roomful of filing cabinets is over there".
Nobody really understands the pros and cons of mass surveillance. Where do you draw the lines between publicly-available Internet stuff, commercially-sensitive Internet stuff, personal Internet stuff and private Internet stuff? Commerce, the right to privacy, and the national security we all pay taxes for, all have different ideas about where to draw those lines. Blink and the technology changes and the rules need to change with it. Don't expect politicians to keep up.
The UK constitution has a reasonably robust series of checks and balances built in to try and work towards a sensible balance on such thorny issues. It's more than most countries' constitutions have, but there's no point in expecting miracles.
Back in the day, PCs had no hard drive and an OS like MSDOS or CP/M had to be loaded from floppy disk on startup.
Neighbour had an Amstrad PCW. The main program for it was the Locoscript wordprocessor, which was integrated with a modified CP/M so that the whole shebang booted off a single disk: clunk, click, whirr, and you were away. You could also get other programs, such as spreadsheets, which ran on CP/M.
Talking one weekend, he says he's bought a spreadsheet but it won't run, so he'll have to send it back on Monday.
I offer to take a look, he shows me the PCW and the offending spreadsheet disk.
I ask, "have you got the CP/M floppy which came with the machine?"
"Somewhere probably, why?"
"You need to load the OS before programs can run on it."
" * "
Three things I would use are phonecall/message status, a big navigation pointer while walking strange streets and voice-activated dictation while driving (as the thing is already in the right place. No talking back to me, mind you!).
An external interface for clip-on medical sensors might come in handy later, if I ever get diabetic or something.
It's more subtle than that. Mass and energy tell spacetime how to curve, the curvature of spacetime tells matter and energy how to move. Gravity is effectively the local curvature of spacetime induced by the presence of mass and energy, so as mass moves around the curvature follows it and as the curvature changes so the mass follows it in a tight feedback loop. Depending where you are looking on the loop, effects on/by are interchangeable.
On time dilation, redshift is just how time dilation is measured, regardless of whether it originated in motion or gravity. A "gravitational redshift" is a measure of gravitational time dilation and is a perfectly sensible way to express that.
Oh, and gravitational waves are indeed "gravity", just as light waves are "light".
To be fair to NASA, the issue is more about risk management and assurance than a lone TV incident. What controls does SpaceX have in place to minimise the risk of doped-out or coked-up staff making dangerous manufacturing slips? Company policy, an inspection and enforcement regime, and corporate culture all play into that mix.
Fair enough. But they should also be asking about the risk of exhausted and sleep-deprived workaholics making similar blunders.
My Mum got much the same job with the Admiralty, and at much the same age. Though the coded messages were ours, they still carried the same horror. And she smoked Black Russians afterwards, not cigars. She in turn taught me what was "important" for the rest of my life.
I'm sure the Baroness needs someone to talk to. This beer's for you, Mum.
Was staggered how fast a 4G connection is at St Pancras station, massively beats my home WiFi/router/BTcopper-cos-sod-you-Sir. A fair bit slower in most provincial towns, but still comparable.
Home 4G is a bit weak and consequently stutters/cuts out a lot, so can't really judge its native speed.
Seriously considering giving myself a 4G through-the-wall thingy for Christmas. If I scrap my copper archaeology it'll pay for itself in a couple of years at most.
With the cost of minor updates being passed on to the consumer, how much are these f*cking things going to cost us once their pwnage gets so obvious even the industry has to admit it, and security fixes start coming through - at cost plus? And how blindingly in-your-face-and-out-your-*rse is exploitation at scale going to have to get before that happens?
Amber Rudderless will get a peerage for this, no doubt.
Upvote for standing up.
However I do find that comparison sites can be useful in narrowing down the field: typically I check several of them out, draw up a shortlist, and then visit each vendor individually. Never buy through them though (except once when a site was running an exclusive bargain offer from my chosen vendor).
"If [company name] ceases trading or delivering on its commitments to UK Gov, for whatever reason, then all its proprietary code shall immediately become licensed under a GNU Public License such as GPL3 or as appropriate to the system usage such as LGPL. Any licensed usage of proprietary third-party tools, such as compilers, used to prepare the code for installation, shall at the same time pass to UK Gov. Agents for UK Gov may take any reasonable steps to recover the source code and place it in a publicly accessible repository, and to recover usable copies of licensed toolsets. Agents for [company name] are forbidden to impede this process in any way and are obliged to support it to the best of their ability."
Hey-ho, I'll get my coat....
"The CSS is only for appearance, it makes a bunch of links look like a picture of a calculator."
Wrong. You evidently didn't try cutting out the CSS between the <style> tags and seeing how the pure HTML actually renders. Try it now. Then eat your words. The key is whether or not the shit is *displayed*, and that is in the CSS attributes.
Markup for display needs to be able to handle white space intelligently. Coding for white space by using alternative markup characters in place of the white space itself is just a little bit mental. Every page markup language seems to have its own touch of the moon, I have never met a really clean one.
Looking at the calc code (y'all did that before sounding off about it, right?), it comprises 21,351 lines, of which all but 15 are HTML. The remainder are CSS, there is no active javascript. So yes, it's just one giant boilerplate lookup table. But something active has to be in there to select which boilerplate, and that uses the CSS display property. This is the core feature that makes it "look" smart even though it isn't really. So the calculator is not in fact written in pure HTML, it is written in HTML+CSS, with the smarts all being in the CSS.
CSS does have some more sophisticated semi-programmatic features, such as the var () function, so it it possible that the code could be much reduced. But AFAIK that could only shrink the amount of boilerplate and bury it deeper, CSS cannot provide true programmability.
More proprietary vendors dropping in incompatible boxen with ripoff support needs built-in. >sigh<
I know, how about starting with a schema/framework standard for the secure storage and interchange of personal health data. Then any fool can buy any box as long as it implements the standard properly. Why, you could even >sharp intake of breath< "publish" the schema in the public domain and >catch that bureaucrat as he faints< solicit comment.
"I had a dream last night" — John B. Sebastian