Posts by Nicodemus's Knob

Britain's Ministry of Defence signs on the dotted line with Palantir

This is your hard earned taxes being wasted.

You know, I'm so tired of paying my taxes when the UK governments pay the likes of US companies for their shit rather than develop the capability in this country. While this goes on we will always be dictated to by US government and they always will have the last say.

What complete dumb asses we have in the MOD, civil service and government that make these decisions. I guess they come from the same school as all the dumb asses in the post office management that created the mess there.

Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust

Re: Bloody Rust

I disagree, while you may think storage is essentially free, I'm aware of certain Linux projects and embedded systems that load the entire OS, including drivers and applications into RAM disc and operate with no hard disc in 1GByte of RAM so rust is a massive disadvantage if it produces binaries significantly larger than the C equivalent. As I understand it while there are some size optimisations you just can't achieve the tiny sizes of a C binary.

Unfortunately just that one thing puts me right off Rust being used in the Linux kernel.

License to launch: UK space regulator gives Virgin Orbit satellites the go-ahead

Sausage rolls

Downvoted cos I happen to think Jamie's sausage rolls are tasty.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: not just OSes

Tesla have a doozy at the moment: there's no way to turn the fog lights on except by bringing up the controls screen, then selecting the lights tab, then turning on the foglamps.

Just what you want to be doing when you run into a sudden bank of thick fog and you're wondering whether the people in front have kept going or slowed right down.

That's why, in the end I opted for the Jaguar Ipace, it didn't feel like they were trying to save money on individual controls by moving them all to a screen. I rarely look at the screens other than to check range or navigate but navigation and speed limits are on the on the heads up display anyway so still keeping eyes on the road.

Is it true you can't open the glove box on a Tesla except by using the screen user interface?

The PainStation runs Windows XP because of course it does

Re: Pain

I know of several XP installations which have worked just fine for decades (10 years and more) without needing reinstalling.

I can take your 10 years and double it and go back another generation.

We have Windows 2000 still running in a production environment after 22 years. And has never been reinstalled ! It runs one very specific program and nothing else. Still on the original hard disk.

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

Re: But then the free thinker / crank / conspiracy theorist would argue ....

programmer of the simulation

Makes you wonder what sort of universe the 'programmer of the simulation' exists in, or is he in fact also in a recursive simulation.

The Recursive Universe, Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

Everyone cites that 'bugs are 100x more expensive to fix in production' research, but the study might not even exist

Not to mention the hours wasted by users.

The cost to the company may well escalate, but there's not much mention of the number of hours wasted by users trying to get some buggy software to work properly, How many reboots. Multiply that by the number of users and your talking about a huge waste of time to everybody because one programmer couldn't be bothered to check the return codes on functions. Yes, that's my pet hate, programmers that don't check return codes. Yes it takes longer as you now need to think about dealing with failures but if you want solid reliable code always check return codes.

Who gave dusty Soviet-era spacecraft that unwanted lick of paint? It was an idiot, with a spraycan, in Baikonur

A nice day out

To be honest, I'd rather go to Cosford with the grandchildren, https://youtu.be/N2v2s9m-pt0 than go see a space shuttle clone covered in shit and graffiti with half of it missing but each to their own.

Parliament demands to know the score with Fujitsu as Post Office Horizon scandal gets inquiry with legal teeth

Ok Fella

For the love of Mary, Joseph and the wee donkey, we need to get AC12 on the case !

'A massive middle finger': Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture

Re: Doesn't inspire confidence in their software chops

Nonsense! What happened to "move fast and break things"? "Breaking things" is vital to modern progress! (Repairing them is unimportant, and thus optional.)

What utter bollocks, breaking things is what programmers do that don't understand what the fuck they are doing. The target is to code with next to zero errors. Thank goodness there are programmers out there that actually give a shit about the quality of code they write.

UK government resists pressure to hold statutory inquiry into Post Office Horizon scandal

Re: Statutory inquiry

When I'm in charge Im going to force everybody to read The Secret Barrister's books. Maybe then there'll be fewer postings that are so ignorant of how the legal system operates.

No sooner said than done.

39 Post Office convictions quashed after Fujitsu evidence about Horizon IT platform called into question

Movie?

This will one day make one helluva movie. So unbelievable it happened, so many failures, with the courts, lawyers, unions, directors, witnesses and of course Fujitsu who failed to stand up and say our software may be unreliable ..

Everybody involved should hold their heads in shame !

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

486

We're still running 486 processors with DOS 4 at work and to be perfectly honest they are as fast as a modern processor running a resource hungry OS for their particular very specific non internet connected use case. Although I don't actually use it I still have my Zx81. I just wish I'd kept that Perkin Elmer mini computer with its core memory from the 70's

Minister tells the House of Lords it'll be another 12 weeks before UK's deleted criminal records can be restored

How long is a piece of string?

that the process would take 12 more weeks – at least five months after the faulty scripts were introduced.

Really? 12 weeks? I'd love to know how they come up with that figure.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: Fluorescents...

Hang on there, is this me from a alternate reality? Your comment is word for word identical to what I would have written. Even your name dwarf has some important meaning to me. Degaussing coils, tick, never buy anything from Philips tick, (you didn't once work for them or many of the companies they gobble up?)

GitHub to replace master with main across its services

Re: "There's no slave in git though"

The reality is that this kind of thing is proposed by young white right-on types who don't have the first clue about what they pontificate about.

Have one million up votes. Exactly what I was thinking.

Microsoft unshackles WSL2 Linux kernel from Windows 10 image for future fettling via Windows Update

Re: @bazza - @martinusher - It's not an OS

You've been able to buy PCs from Novatech without an O.S. for years. https://www.novatech.co.uk/workstation/graphics/

Capita, Fujitsu and pals tuck into slices of £3bn London NHS framework

It's not their money they are spending

Good grief, I'm confident that they pull a number out of a hat, the hat with numbers provided by the usual suspects.

It's not their money they are spending, just the good old British public's and everybody knows that's unlimited.