Posts by ibmalone

The Eldritch Horror of Date Formatting is visited upon Tesco

Chlorine washing soup is a bit tricky...

Re: You don't hear much Polari on El Reg much these days...

Morning crescent is what I sometimes have for breakfast, occasionally with ham and cheese.

Wait. Croissant. Morning croissant.

Gare du Nord.

Re: Tesco, dates, social media

Though in the course of checking I discovered this man who has been terrorising Tesco in Devon and Cornwall.

Re: Tesco, dates, social media

Think this one might be lawyer territory. While it seems to be the case that with petrol you are settling a debt (as the goods have already been supplied, though if not you could do a little dance of having payment refused and then filling out whatever inability to pay form they have to create a debt), there is mixed advice about when legal tender actually settles a debt. Bank of England and the Royal Mint slightly differ ("pays into court"), with this heroic freedom of information request eventually getting the response that they should seek legal advice. And at the end of the day you are dealing with someone who doesn't really know the law either and is just doing what their manager told them.

Re: best way so far?

At the end of the day they could all just be arbitrary squiggles.

Tesco, dates, social media

This episode has jogged a memory from last year, when Tesco did rather less well on dates and twitter.

Cast your mind back to 1st March 2018; this was the last day that paper £10 Bank of England notes could be used. Having a small amount of cash at home for emergencies I realised it needed to be spent. So, that afternoon used it to top up a travel card and attempted to buy some groceries. You can see where this is going. Tesco metro staff adamant that "no longer used after 1st March" means no longer used on 1st March. So I went and spent the money at Sainsbury's instead.

Slightly irritated (and after checking) I complained on Twitter, and rather than pickle puns got an un-amusing, "As of that date, they are being withdrawn from circulation. All our colleagues at manned checkouts are aware that they should not accept the notes from 1 March." It appears the entire company misunderstood the BoE guidance and stopped taking them a day early.

Of course "legal tender" is a strictly limited concept, and shops can choose not to accept currency pretty much arbitrarily; it's why your local corner shop is in its rights to put up "No £50 note's" signs. But I thought it was a bit poor that a. their twitter team couldn't simply say "sorry about that", b. whoever they put in charge of the phase-out failed to check the most basic thing about their task. Fortunately one of the up-sides of living in a fairly big city is having some choice over the level, or at least type, of muppetry you'll tolerate, so I haven't given them any plastic £10 notes, or indeed money in any other form since.

Re: Julian dates WTF

No, it's worse than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

"The Julian day number is based on the Julian Period proposed by Joseph Scaliger, a classical scholar, in 1583, at the time of the Gregorian calendar reform, as it is the least common multiple of three calendar cycles used with the Julian calendar:

" 15 (indiction cycle) × 19 (Metonic cycle) × 28 (Solar cycle) = 7980 years"

So it can mean either the number of days since the epoch (to astronomers and historians) or the number of the day in the year (to people who make ready meals).

Re: best way so far?

YYYYMMDD is allowed by ISO 8601, and has the pleasant property of numerical sort order being the same as date sort order. Although the hyphenated format YYYY-MM-DD is more agreeable to people and still lexically sortable until 10k AD rolls around.

What I hadn't taken note of previously is that ISO 8601 also includes an ordinal date representation, YYYY-DDD. (Must be three digits, otherwise it would be ambiguous with YYYY-MM.)

Re: Julian dates WTF

According to The Wiki* the term is also used in the food industry** to refer to the ordinal date format that the article mentions.

* citation needed

** by who?

https://www.dm.usda.gov/procurement/toolkit/docs/calendar.pdf

If it is in the cupboard long enough that a two digit year becomes ambiguous then it's either passed the best before or never will.

According to an interesting programme on food safety a few years ago (possibly BBC), expiration dates are set by measuring how long it takes from contamination until the food is unsafe to eat. The premise is if it somehow gets contaminated before leaving the factory it shouldn't kill anyone.

RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud

Re: Expiry Date Never

They do have another option...

(in the absence of a crosshairs icon ->)

Open-heart nerdery: Boffins suggest identifying and logging in people using ECGs

Re: New technology spawns new problems (or at least excuses)

This at least is okay, mobile phones let you make emergency calls without unlocking.

Also worth knowing: on both iPhone and Android you can set emergency medical information including, an emergency contact, that can be accessed without unlocking the phone (think first responders): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Case_of_Emergency. Although if you have a serious condition you probably want to carry the information in hard-copy form.

Re: New technology spawns new problems (or at least excuses)

Or after pulling an all-nighter revising / finishing coursework. Good news when you turn up half an hour before that 12pm deadline and are too frazzled for the machine to let you submit!

(And of course all the other stuff about biometrics being usernames not passwords, but it doesn't seem like anyone is actually listening on that...)

What the cell...? Telcos around the world were so severely pwned, they didn't notice the hackers setting up VPN points

Re: "outside North America"

Who knows; maybe USA wasn't looked at, maybe there's an entire different team of hackers assigned to the USA, maybe north American equipment is too antiquated to run a VPN.

Out of Steam? Wine draining away? Ubuntu's 64-bit-only x86 decision is causing migraines

Re: Interesting

There has been plenty of notice given that the plan for longer term support of 32 bit legacy applications was through Snap packages, which allow application developers to bundle specific versions of libraries with their applications.

And illustrating an issue with all these solutions (snap, flatpack, docker, whatever); if you can no longer build the libraries you're stuck anyway, it just lets you pretend for a while longer. While maybe easier to achieve than just static linking everything the effect in terms of long-term compatibility is not much different.

Comms room, comms room, comms room is on fire – we don't need no water, let the engineer burn

Re: Complacency over evacuation procedures

Supposedly a very common occurrence, people try to leave by their familiar exit route rather than the nearest available.

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

Supposedly the seller of a car should be the one filling out V5C/2 ‘new keeper supplement’ of the log book with the purchaser's name and address. Not sure if they are meant to check or not.

For the rest, opening accounts without photo ID is pretty tricky, here's what you need according to one random bank's website if you don't have one of passport, EU(~) driving license or national ID card, or firearms license:

Valid older style UK driving licence (no photo)

HMRC documentation (PAYE Coding Notice/Tax Notification/Self-Assessment/Statement of Account/NI contributions bill) issued in the last 3 months or valid for the current tax year. We can’t accept P45 or P60 forms

Notification letter from Benefits Agency/Local Authority confirming your right to benefits (Department for Work and Pensions including Jobcentre Plus, Benefits Agency or Veterans Agency), dated within the last 12 months.

Is this...

Is this an episode of Hustle?

PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Re: 'about equal to the size of Texas'

It took me a while to work out what you were talking about: a football is one of the register standard units of volume, while a football pitch is area (as is only right, otherwise which length would you use? diagonal, á la screen sizes?). They are strangely grouped at the low end; one chicken egg being about two walnuts, or one third of a grapefruit (is that a Waldorf salad?), or one thirtieth of a football, or nothing of an Olympic swimming pool, which can contain a little under 20 whales (provided the RSPCA isn't looking).

Re: 'about equal to the size of Texas'

To fit in below the Marshall (at 11) and Disaster Area.

Re: 'about equal to the size of Texas'

A whale is clearly a unit of volume. (And would nicely fill a six orders of magnitude gap in the reg standards converter between football and Olympic sized swimming pool.)

Microsoft, you should look away now: Google's cloud second only to AWS in dev survey

Re: Clueless coders

GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and is hosted obviously on Azure

Is it? There weren't any immediate plans for migration to Azure when they were acquired and a quick search can't turn up any announcements that they actually have since.

After years of listening, we've heard not a single peep out of any aliens, say boffins. You think you can do better? OK, here's 1PB of signals

To miss-quote Eric Raymond: "Given enough eyeballs, all problems become shallow".

Except for, "How do I escape from drowning in eyeballs?"

This isn't Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Re: "simulations" and "models", bwahaha

Not exactly: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/04/09/the-cost-of-training-u-s-air-force-fighter-pilots-infographic/ hovers around $10M to train on the newer aircraft. Plus actually losing a plane is definitely not cheap.

An early implementation of genetic algorithms?

Re: Really?

Or my favourite, not recognizing their aircraft was in a stall for tens of thousands of feet in VFR -- these things called "windows" are useful to determine aircraft attitude, and I know the cockpit has at least a few...

If this is Air France, attitude itself wasn't exactly the problem (and apparently poor or no visibility meant windows were of little help). Hannah Fry's excellent "Hello World" has a good account of it. One of the chief causes was that neither the captain nor the other co-pilot realised that Bonin (the pilot flying when they encountered problems) had his stick back the whole time, including not releasing it when Robert took control and thereby cancelling out Robert's attempt to lower the nose. Robert was trying, and Dubois (when he re-entered the cockpit) also ordered to pitch as soon as he realised what was happening.

Interestingly the point of that part of the book is nearly-good-enough automation causes people to rely on it to the point where they don't have enough experience when the system is forced to hand over control. The AF flight gave control back to the pilots because of faulty sensor inputs, but the pilot flying did not have enough experience flying without assistance to react properly. This may have been compounded by confusing feedback from the automated systems, such as the stall warning resuming when the nose was lowered (and inputs became valid again). Both co-pilots seem not to have realised what the stall warning was actually telling them (if speculation that Bonin kept pulling back in response to the stall warning is correct).

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Emmer not going to comment.

The Americans use "spelled" for some strange reason

Due to the high prevalence of magicians.

Re: Dolt

While not in the same league (picture taken of text using a phone covered in Moiré patterns is the superior way of diagnosing issues, preferably not including all the text, only the irrelevant part), terminal copy and paste from Macs is entertaining because it seems the default must be to copy the user's terminal colour settings.

If only <span> was allowed, this comment would have been in fashionable white on black.

Oblivious 'influencers' work on 3.6-roentgen tans in Chernobyl after realising TV show based on real nuclear TITSUP

Re: On the subject of The Handmaid's Tale...

J K Rowling is a CH! Suspect PTerry got the short end of the stick as "humorists" are regarded as frivolous. Glad he got the knighthood in the end.

Bear insistent on playing tonsil tennis with you? Just bite its tongue off

Re: license, hell

While I admit to having kissed a moose I would draw the line at exchanging spit with a bear.

Adding this to the "when in Canada" list.

When it comes to DNS over HTTPS, it's privacy in excess, frets UK child exploitation watchdog

Re: Garbage

History seems to suggest this is what you end up with to varying degrees, anarchies (in the political idealist sense) have no inherent defence against taking power by force. So you end up somewhere on a continuum of how centralised control and distribution of wealth are. Our society is somewhat more egalitarian than medieval feudalism for example.

Re: Garbage

It's an interesting case. Linux of course isn't, it's a benevolent dictatorship (less dictatorish these days), but its assembly together with GNU would better fit the description. I think the contrast between commodities and ideas is important. Anyone can copy and redistribute code without depriving the originator of their copy (copyright is another matter, I'll assume anarchists don't care), it can be quickly transported anywhere (using physical networks that are maintained, or at times in the early days using postal services), and software depends for its operation on hardware which doesn't have these properties. In a way it's quite similar to the enlightenment era idea of a republic of letters.

Re: Garbage

In what sense then does a consensual democracy or capitalist economy actually differ from anarchy?

Re: Garbage

They could probably build a rubbish truck in an anarchic society, they just couldn't run a garbage collection service.

Could they though? You need steel, specialised engineering to make engine parts, fuel extraction and processing, various materials in small amounts (rubber, insulators for electrical components). Today we use a global distribution network to source and process these things. You probably don't need that, the early industrial revolution got by with a smaller industrial base (how else could it have been bootstrapped?) to make cruder, less efficient machines, but still probably beyond the ability of one person. Once you've got more than one person coordinating their efforts or cooperating is it really anarchy?

Boffins stole our 3D files – and gave them all to Facebook's AI eggheads, claims Lithuanian biz

Re: FFS

I'm coming to believe the poster is either a very dedicated parody account or somebody's experiment at auto-generating AI nonsense-speak. However they're sufficiently prolific to now be a nuisance whenever the topic comes up, rather than entertaining.

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

Re: Unfair comparison

This is a reasonable point, Singapore would fit inside the M25.

Of course that makes it reasonable to compare London's broadband provision with Singapore's and say it's still unimpressive.

Apple strips clips of WWDC devs booing that $999 monitor stand from the web using copyright claims. Fear not, you can listen again here...

Re: Censorship not the stand is the problem

I seriously wouldn't ever consider or want an OEM bundled stand on a pro monitor; just stop including the things already and make everything VESA. A VESA stand should be like "batteries not included." Including plastic trash stands for serious users is not responsible.

We've got some radiology standard monitors (made by people that make these things, not the people that make your TV), that came with their own very sturdy adjustable VESA bases, the only reason you'd want to change them is to use an arm mount. Expensive, but actually closer to Apple's stand than its monitor in price.

LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

That's cool, but I was distinguishing HD (which doesn't look like it'll go much past 12TB) from SSD. And nobody uses tape for primary storage. They use it for depth.

30TB SSD 12k USD.

36TB HD SAS ~ 1.3k USD

36TB LTO-8 ~0.9k USD (if you could get it)

30TB LTO-7 ~0.4k USD (normal -7, couldn't find M8 pricing quickly)

If you have some need to keep TB of data for months or years you'll probably think twice before buying SSD for each copy. Maybe in 5-10 years 30TB will be pretty affordable, maybe if the LTO lot manage to make up they'll have 64-128TB tapes by then.

Re: Sure this will be great on the long term

Interesting IEEE Spectrum article last year (don't think it's paywalled), about this. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape

The short version is spinning disc technology got developed over the past couple of decades while tape languished, tape is now catching up in terms of innovation because there's more room to push the technology. You can see this in HD capacities topping out in the past few years, but tape continuing upwards (nobody is seriously talking about 24TB HD, but it's the next step on the LTO roadmap). Of course, if SSD can keep its current pace it may obsolete both in a few years, but only if this tape infighting means they lose enough market share that development stalls.

Bad news. Asteroid 1999 KW4 flew by, did not hit Earth killing us all. Good news: Another one, Didymos, is on the way

Re: 31 years - that's all we've got

Better than five years.

"In the worst possible case..."

“In the worst possible case, this knowledge is also essential to predict how an asteroid could interact with the atmosphere and Earth’s surface, allowing us to mitigate damage in the event of a collision.”

This is rather optimistic!

Pick your worst possible case:

We don't see it coming.

We see it coming, five minutes before it hits.

We spot it and are able to predict its interaction with the atmosphere and Earth's surface; it will look like the Vredefort crater.

We spot it coming, the Photino Birds launched it.

Re: A pair of asteroids just whizzed past Earth

Not exactly, the moon and earth are sufficiently massive they're not going to notice the effect of a tiny asteroid flying by. Not on the scale of thousands of years anyway. The outcome is harder to predict, but modellable.

Dissed Bash boshed: Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' 10.15

Don't assume /bin/sh is /bin/bash though, even on Linux. Scripts written as if /bin/sh is bash will break on Ubuntu where dash provides POSIX (but bash is the login shell).

I guess this change might hurt Mac users trying to run real bash scripts if bash itself is no longer available (and does sound like they'll be aiming to drop it).

Never got into zsh, I like it in theory, but my philosophy is generally once you find a situation needs the more advanced features in bash you need to switch to a more programming / less interactive language. (And context sensitive completion is great unless you mainly use commands it's not defined for. Actually, this has reminded me to get round to checking how to disable it in later bash...)

LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents

Re: ██████

███████ think ██████ one of the ████ creative ████ opening █████████ I've ████ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBQJjqnG1iI

One man went to mow a meadow, hoping Trump would spot giant grass snake under flightpath

I don't know about the US, but in the UK leaving home before finishing school is usually reserved for the more unfortunate cases of family breakdown. However, according to the linked article he does run an online marketplace, so technically he's got one already.

Edit: use of the word "gaff" suggests a UK poster, not realising an A-level student isn't really expected to have moved out of their parents' home suggests non-UK. So who knows...

Planes, fails and automobiles: Overseas callout saved by gentle thrust of server CD tray

Re: airport security

TSA is just limited to America of course. I had my luggage cut open once as it was locked with a TSA lock, on reflection in the UK obviously they don't have the keys (probably the only ones who don't by now), and they decided it was easier to cut the zips than the lock.

Re: airport security

In the UK a small blade is allowed, https://www.gov.uk/hand-luggage-restrictions/personal-items though in the immediate years after 2001 there was a significant degree more hysteria and my grandmother had to part with a small pair of nail scissors.

Of course what's actually in the rules may have no bearing on what the person at security thinks the rules are. My favourite remains ice (think lollipops etc.) not being allowed, because obviously they're water and water is a liquid...

Egg on North Face: Wikipedia furious after glamp-wear giant swaps article pics for sneaky ad shots – and even brags about it in a video

Re: To play devil's advocate...

Correction:

and though I don't think their approach explicitly violates any of this maybe explicitly adding the text would

Re-reading the article, it sounds like the logos were super-imposed, rather than merely 'in' the photograph, which I'd guess puts them on par with the text addition from that perspective. (Though makes it less useful for others from a creative commons point of view, so a different image without be preferable anyway.)