Posts by Vometia has insomnia. Again.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: proper beer

There was one round Hatfield or Stalbans in by student days that did so. ISTR it was Old Roger (allegedly spelt "Owd") but that was 40 years back and I can't even remember if I was there or tried the substance in question.

Re: (larger) US pint

It'll give you scabies, or maybe a bad case of the snickers. Didn't some Rev just get done for that?

Re: (larger) US pint

I'd incorrectly assumed it must be smaller as I reasoned that's where the smaller 25ml "floz" measure comes from when it's something expensive; I was going to say "like spirits" but actually can't remember where I've seen it; it seems used to calculate some oddly arbitrary bottle sizes where decimalisation remains the gift that still keeps on giving after 50+ years (not that I'm against it per se, just the lack of dealing with some sharp practises). Though going the other way, a proper pint glass has to be be around 600 ml as it's supposed to contain 568ml of actual beer and the head doesn't count towards that.

Re: Zoölogy

Anonypoo sez:

Back in the days of clackomatic typewriters I recall fabricating a diaeresis by over striking with the double quote key (") which probably led to its extinction in English on the buggerit principle.

I suspect this coincided with the extinction of typing pools and the diacritically inclined were faced with DIY document preparation "Zo[ALT]+0244 ô bugger! ... Zo[ALT]+0246 ölogy ... sod this for a game of soldiers."

It seems that the compose key has largely fallen out of fashion of late. It's the modern (as in c. 1980s) means of typing, backspacing, and adding frilly bits and I use it a great deal; especially handy as my late gf's name had an e-with-flair in it even though she'd given up trying to type it correctly herself (mostly as a lot of online crapps still don't know what they're doing with UTF) but how else can one type Spın̈al Tap's name correctly? Unfortunately a lot of font-rendering also messes up combining characters, forgetting the width of the previous one, so the n̈ will look wonky on some screens and not others.

Unfortunately there's eleventy billion entries in XCompose and I keep adding more because "that seems handy" and then have to keep looking them up because I chose something neither memorable nor sensible. But I also chose sensible shortcuts such as a+6 for â and u+2 for ü because throwing the shift key into the equation made it even more likely that my mistyping would have its usual irritating effects. One of the worst is the Portuguese' love of ã, which is now a + #.

Re: Vincent truck Gogh

I've just been reading about Goch; it hadn't occurred to me to consider how it might be pronounced. Which of course probably varies a lot anyway, even simple things "ich" ranging from kinda "argh" to "eh". And my German sucks without all this general confoundment und scheiß; how's it pronounced in Geordie?¹ That'll be the correct way.

1. Not Mackem, obvs.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: The utter shittiness of English law

Same happens in the UK. The local health trust, effectively a privately run company, murders its patients. That isn't a euphemism: they're more interested in the results of their unethical medical experiments and the life of someone with PTSD is cheap. Local coroner, i.e. a judge, has apparently been burying case after case for years. Certainly buried my girlfriend's, rubber-stamped the verdict before the funeral had even happened and more than six months before the sham "hearing". The amount of gaslighting I've had from both the Great And Good™ as well as the majority of "common sense" types who thoughtlessly believe them has been surreal and unpleasant. Which is why this shit is happening more and more.

The NHS security culture problem is a crisis years in the making

Re: Good times

I thought it was his predecessor; someone so dull I forget his name offhand, but the one who introduced and enforced this absurd internal market malarkey that broke everything. Not that I'm trying to defend Wanksock, in fact I feel a bit dirty diluting any of his well-deserved ire.

"Board member"...?

You're unlikely to see any senior managers in the actual hospital. They have their own gated communities on sites well away from smelly patients.

Junior techie rushed off for fun weekend after making a terminal mistake that crashed a client

Re: And one closer to the story here...

Turned the reset key in the wrong computer. :| The one that the C-suite secretaries used. As much as I might try to defend myself because the then ops manager had decided in his wisdom to mismatch the computers and their consoles, it was pretty careless. I realised when I had it at full lock.

Also left a call to a comedy "panic" script in the sysadmin login to wind up the day-shift ops staff. Then, inevitably, something actually important cropped up and while I was dealing with it I forgot all about my prank and went home. The night shift triggered it and called out the emergency engineers whose manager didn't see the funny side. My manager did a good job of protecting me from the fallout, thankfully (for me), but my teenage years seemed to extend through most of my 20s too.

Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks to AI's insatiable thirst

Re: we won't be even touched with the barge pole by AI gang

Yeah. If there's not enough to go round, I don't see the plebs getting any sort of priority, just higher prices and an ever more unreliable supply. People hark back to the power cuts of the '70s as "the bad old days" (as a kid, a couple of evenings lit only by candle-light was kinda cool) but this will probably end up worse and it'll potentially be forever.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: 'Fujitsu is obviously blame-free'

fwiw I don't think they're *actually* paying you: apart from the unlikelihood of you accepting such a deal, I don't think they have the PR skills. My reaction was probably more a case of this now being all anyone knows of a once innovative computer company and feeling a bit sad; then again, a decreasing number of people outside of the various oldies and curmudgeons have heard of the likes of DEC either. :(

Re: They still don't get it.

I'm also of the opinion that the C-suite culprits of all involved as well as the politicians who are still dicking about with this should be treated harshly. Maybe I'm becoming vindictive in my old age but I'm no longer as against the death penalty as I used to be; for people like them, especially the politicians, I'd like it brought back as a reminder that power should come with responsibility and consequences.

Re: The wheels of British so-called justice turn extremely slowly

I think that's being optimistic tbh. They didn't even bring out the well-worn "Lessons Will Be Learned™" rubber stamp when my gf was murdered by staff at the local hospital because there're too many important people with vested interests; especially research, lots of money changing hands, so there's zero chance of getting an investigation. The Post Office scandal will never be adequately resolved, same as all the others which invariably drag on for decades because tptb know perfectly well that the complainants will eventually run out of money (and life).

"first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company later bought by Fujitsu"

The Register unfailingly includes this line in any article about what I'm half inclined to start calling The Fujitsu Scandal as it feels rather contrived. Is Fujitsu paying you to say "Fujitsu is obviously blame-free in this unpleasant business and is the real victim here"?

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

Re: Police states

Unless one of the Great Unwashed needs it and will be told it was either "taped over" or given a copy that appears to have come from an original VHS recorder on tape which has been in constant use for 43 years and never had the tracking adjusted; and from a black and white (or rather murky and slightly lighter murky) camera that's never had the lens cleaned.

BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows

El RegTeh Registrationizer even capitalised it as a proper noun but still spelt it wrong anyway. I'm still not really sure what's their point; some of their attempts to assert they're an American site now come across as a little antagonistic, or at least trying too hard.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

VaxClusters

Sounds similar to the method used by CI-based VaxClusters back in the day, especially the HSC storage control units: DEC knew interrupts were computationally expensive and kept those generated by traffic to and from the HCSs to an absolute minimum whenever possible. I often wondered why e.g. NFS often felt oddly sluggish in comparison and realised that may be at least one of the reasons.

UK digital markets watchdog expects to launch investigations within the month using new powers

Re: So it's the same b.s. as in Europe then...

I'd really prefer it if everyone started calling bribery what it is rather than euphemisms like lobbying, hospitality, strategic partnership and so on. These problems could be sorted out at a stroke if bribery wasn't made effectively legal by calling it something else. :|

Twigstats software sheds light on mysteries of Europe's old-school migrators

Re: Possible reasons for invasions not causing language changes in Britain

I dunno, but then again I'm a Geordie and the Normans... well, weren't. Though even that is largely irrelevant as random words there are just making me all Finbarr Saunders. I should probably go back to sleep.

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

Re: Still?

More a case of plucking my eyebrows, which sadly don't pluck themselves. A pertinent question might be why I was trying to multitask when I know I'm barely even a single-tasking system.

Re: Still?

Thanks, I just stabbed myself in the face with the tweezers because I was laughing so much.

Re: Still?

I just stole myself a VaxStation. Actually pretty fancy for its day, and it ran VMS & DECwindows. I suppose I could've tried to get it admission to the cluster, but after fighting with DeathNet Phase V I decided that was quite enough faffing about for one lifetime.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

Re: turrets, autoloaders etc are electric anyway

Larger tanks often have an auxiliary engine to generate electricity so they don't have to run the main engine to do so. IIRC, the Centurion used a 1,000 cc Austin or Morris engine to do the job, though their crews often complained that it was the most unreliable part of the entire vehicle so they'd end up having to use the 27 litre main engine to generate electricity. Smaller tanks like the Scorpion didn't, which is why their nice E-type engines were often shagged out in fairly short order due to running them at full speed all the time to keep the turret's batteries charged up.

I know that Ferdinand Porsche was obsessed with electrical drive systems, typically involving air-cooled petrol engines, but they seldom worked that well. Whereas Merritt's regenerative steering did: its only fault was the fancier controls he tried to implement when it made its debut on the Churchill which just added more things that could break (and did), which is why British tanks reverted to brake levers thereafter, but still connected to the new steering unit that could do fancy stuff like turning on the spot; shown to good effect with Comets managing to navigate the twisty little roads in German villages where the Shermans got stuck. He wryly observed that the Germans copied the system from a captured Churchill and their implementation on the Tiger et al made it more complicated. With the anticipated results.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

I've never really used PCs except for gaming. It took me a long time to even realise what the VT220-style compose key did: for many years I'd press it by accident when I missed the space bar and then it'd seemingly lock up the keyboard for the next couple of keypresses. I eventually discovered it was configurable in the terminal settings so redefined it as escape, though that had much the same problem.

But I was also "that person" who took an age to wean off ed and use vi. I was originally taught to use emacs but the reams of documentation didn't highlight the actually useful bits like global search and replace, and ed was basic enough that it was easy to find stuff like that.

Now the only problem is finding all those 8-bit characters and their "what code page is it?" malarky typically display as something weird on UTF-friendly applications so I'm constantly having to update them. And then I get to play the "so what's it supposed to be?" game... D:

I have my Pi 4 bolted to the back of my PiDP-10 console. It's fast enough to simulate a PDP-10 mainframe at a decent speed, even with 32-bit Linux and (though I haven't got round to it yet) probably capable of running Kodi at the same time.

Re: Keyboard layout

I hate flat keyboards. I'm not even that keen on stepped keyboards and prefer the C64's curved profile, though I wasn't so fond of its mushy (or dampened) feel. Probably why I liked the Model M so much when I first encountered one. Which is, ironically, a membrane keyboard, just with a fancy mechanism on top.

One thing I remember from the early '80s computer boom that I haven't seen often enough (in fact I don't recall seeing it anywhere else) is the Atari 800 which protected the reset key with an immovable bar across the top and bottom to lessen the risk of it being pressed unintentionally: only the middle part moved. Dunno why that sort of thing wasn't more commonplace; perhaps fingernails (I always kept mine short) but more likely the manufacturers being tight-arses. DEC's approach was (eventually) to move it out of the way at the end of the function-keys; IIRC the key next to it didn't do anything particularly useful so it wasn't likely to be pressed by mistake.

Re: Keyboard layout

Derived from "hashbang" IIRC, but I probably wasn't paying attention at the time.

Re: Keyboard layout

libra; same reason £ is an L with a line through it, but I can never remember the proper spellings of s and d without looking them up.

Re: Keyboard layout

Yeah, it's the likes of Dow Jones that use the three-letter symbols rather than Lloyds high-street banking. I hadn't really thought about it back in the day, but I'd no idea what half the relevant symbols actually are (well, probably much more than half; I see one every now and then and I'm all "oh, that's what it looks like."

Re: Keyboard layout

I dunno what I'd do without the .XCompose file. Though I still have to keep adding to it because I can never remember so many of the existing sequences; and even when I can, some of them seem to be particularly awkward and/or prone to typos: I'm glad I rarely have to enter anything in Portuguese, ã is particularly irritating and if I'll always mistype part of it unless I look at the keyboard in the process (yeah, I'm still a terrible typist at least 45 years after first experimenting with a typewriter; partly the same reason I play bass instead of guitar too, it's harder to get the wrong string, though I still manage).

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Boing

I tried using a rugby player to get a door open, since someone had forgotten to authorise our key-cards for a demo or something. The magnet holding it shut can't be that strong, surely. He was a big lad but he just bounced off. We tried him a few times but no joy.

Seems none of us were creative nor light-fingered enough to think of the more interesting solutions described.

What might a second term of Trump mean for the US space program?

Re: No. Venus.

I love that song, have an upvote!

Rust haters, unite! Fil-C aims to Make C Great Again

It might be expedient to make programmers actually bother to check return values: I once worked with someone whose code never, ever did this, whether it was malloc or anything else. No error checking, no sanity checking, nothing. They'd previously worked for a software house whose stuff I'd used around the same time and I still had painful memories of its habit of crashing often. Now I know why.

Rust isn't going to fix this sort of bad coding. It may avoid some pitfalls but it won't turn bad/lazy programmers into awesome ones; on the contrary, judging by the fanboyism, it'll just cause Volvo Driver Syndrome.

UK government plays power broker with small modular reactor suitors

Re: Hmm

Investment was being wound down as far back as the '60s. They started haemorrhaging talent way back. Just as the AGR design had pretty much got to where they needed it and they could recoup the investment costs by building the dozens planned, Thatcher canned it completely. JET has been underfunded since the outset which is why it's perpetually 10 years in the future. Unfortunately so much UK tech is like this: wonderful ideas canned just as they're about to really take off and the technology is given to someone else to sell back to us.

Ongoing typosquatting campaign impersonates hundreds of popular npm packages

Re: Hmm.

I've witnessed my own typing. I've been doing it for close to 45 years and I'm still rubbish.

Public sector cyber break-ins: Our money, our lives, our right to know

It looks like something straight outta the Lewis Page era. Only with American spelling.

Seems a bit of an edgelord take on clickbait.

Ugh, I'm fiftysomething and look like my grandmother when she was 60something. Why am I using "yoof" terminology?

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Mozilla still found the time to remove the "excessive complexity" of allowing the user to turn off auto-select-all when you click in the URL & search boxes. Lots of people have complained and some git at Mozilla keeps on defending the removal of user choice on the basis of "consistent UI across all platforms" which is a rather odd way of looking at it. And quite annoying too. Pity they don't spend more of their time fixing bugs instead, especially the seemingly worse-with-every-release memory leaks.

Elon Musk's X isn't important enough to feel the full force of EU regulation

Yeah; though I've used it for years, there's never been a "golden age" beyond the good ole days of nostalgia. Though under the wayward control of the ketamine baboon and his bizarre whims it is admittedly (far) worse than ever before.

Re: Why should it be classed as important ?

Nobody seems to remember Orkut! I have (semi) fond recollections, but also of it being one of the slowest webshites in existence and it'd give you a randomly-long IP ban if you tried to reload. But it was still kinda fun for a good long while until it started to go wrong (mainly the perennial problem with lack of effective moderation) and finally when Google inevitably got bored and killed it.

Tesla Cybertruck recalled again. This time, a software fix for backup camera glitch

Re: Robo Cyber Trucks

I'm still endlessly amused by that, and Star Trekkin' that someone else just posted. Nobody seems to do proper arsing about any more.

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: Yeah, we can trust the DWP

They were still harassing me about my gf being reassessed six months after she died. They knew she was dead (not least as I used their own system when it happened) and I'd told them multiple times but they wouldn't relent, until they eventually sent a letter saying a decision had been made, but not what their decision was nor even what it was about. Atos predictably joined in with the bastardiness and their inter-personal skills were the expected bored-sounding "not our problem to deal with".

Re: Seems a bit odd

HMRC (going back to when it was the Inland Revenue) has used systems to detect this sort of thing for over 30 years. I'm kinda surprised to hear people still do it.

Meta back at it, harvesting Britons' public Facebook, Insta feeds for AI training

Re: ICO

They all sound like they use the same naming convention as the breeding women in The Handmaid's Tale. I have to wonder if that's coincidental.

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: 1989, which pre-dates "Acceptable Use Policies"

I remember almost being chucked out of college for that sort of malarky the year before. I was a horrible teenager.

Re: A number of things wrong with this account

There was CLIST (I think) on MVS whose variables were &THINGY IIRC. And Rexx went on to be the main scripting language on the Amiga, too. 30+ years after being refused a VM account because I couldn't make a business case (everything had to be paid for where IBM big iron was concerned; compared to our department's herd of SysV boxes, which had fairly sophisticated accounting too, but it was only used for capacity planning rather than sending monthly bills to every department that used them. I felt a bit disappointed that my creative lying let me down on that occasion tho') I've been intending to learn Rexx as it looks interesting and I've been swearing about Bash for years, so an alternative that isn't Python would be nice, but I still haven't got round to it.

About a quarter of my badge number! I had to hand mine back but the photo was bloody awful anyway. I still have my VaxStation, tho'...

Transport for London confirms 5,000 users' bank data exposed, pulls large chunks of IT infra offline

Re: Motorists will pay

Spike Milligan's Dalek recommends "put them in the curry!" which is one possibility.

Re: could include bank account numbers and sort codes

After I'd been working in London for just a short time I decided it was easier to walk the mile-and-a-half from Liverpool Street to the Arse End: I had a choice of Central, Circle, etc but they were all so problematic, and always had about a billion sweaty commuters packed onto the platform already.

My colleagues seemed grateful. Although they didn't believe in any sort of woo in the slightest, they noticed I'm so technophobic that the train always broke down when I got on it but was mostly reliable in my absence.

Google's ex-CEO U-turns after saying staff 'going home early' killed winning

Re: WFH increases my productivity

This was well known when I worked from home in the '90s (this was "DEC: The Greasy Bob Years", and his means of hitting quarterly targets included selling office space, as well as the usual redundancies and flogging anything still generating a profit to competitors) and I'd already been warned about the inclination to over-work which was well known about from previous studies. It probably more or less balanced out, but I remember it wasn't uncommon for me to wake up at 2am with a good idea and immediately start working on it. It was also much easier to get stuff done without the constant interruptions from the productivity-free "must be seen to be doing something" types.