Posts by John H Woods

Re: Such a truly stupid and lazy plan perfectly setup to fail horribly

"It reeks of lazy ignorant fools who want to be seen to do something rather than actually do something that works." --- Jim234

The Politician's Syllogism so excellently lampooned in Yes, Prime Minister.

We must do something

This is something

Therefore, we must do this.

Aviation ...

at least those are all measures of "amount" ... shipping, being somewhat more historic, has things like a ton that's a volume (a shipping ton is 40 or 42 cubic feet depending which side of the Atlantic you're on, and a register ton is 100).

AC, I'm not missing the point. I don't think he said that his Muslim ban would be an immediate, ill-thought, rushed through executive order which applied (after some shilly-shallying) to people who were already legally resident in the US.

You've only got a realistic choice of two presidential candidates. Just because you voted for one of them doesn't mean you have to support everything they do; it's entirely possible you thought they were the lesser of two evils. This seems clear to me, but perhaps I am, as you say, a numpty.

"There is a difference between "protesting and acting like a spoilt child" --- these people think they are protesting; you think they are acting like spoiled children. So, it appears the difference is just whether you agree with their protest or not.

Re: By The Short and Curlies

"The reality is, if your business depends on a piece of software, you will probably pay whatever." P.Lee

Indeed. Furthermore, most businesses are, in my experience, ridiculously squeamish about CapEx even when their OpEx is almost out of control, so an ongoing subscription or licence often gains approval more easily than a lump sum. Although, that's possibly a good thing, because often when they do cut OpEx they normally do it in a way that damages the business.

Re: Judge with a sense of humour

" If you get on the wrong side of one you'll find they're well able to express their opinion." -- Dr Syntax

During an epic divorce/residence battle that went all the way to the High Court, my ex-wife's solicitors were somewhat untruthful. Unfortunately for them I had evidence of that which I was permitted to present. The almost unimaginably eloquent ire that was then directed at that side of the court room was so intense I *almost* felt sorry for them.

Re: All of the above notwithstanding, it's a bit hard to understand use of rm -rf ...

"Nobody every done "rm -rf . /tempfolder"?" -- Ogi

30 long years ago I over-lingered on the SHIFT key, rm -r *.o became rm -r *>o and left me with a single file containing a single byte. Now I usually put an -i in, and when it seems to be right, exit and edit the command line to remove just the -i before setting it off in anger.

But for specific critical folders you could use cp -al DoomedFolder/ QuickSnapshot/ ... Now, QuickSnapshot contains hardlinks to all the files and folders in DoomedFolder but because you haven't copied anything you don't need all that much space (just a bit for the new inodes) to do it (or much time to execute it). Now you can rm -r DoomedFolder and you've still got a second chance.

Re: Colossus: The Forbin Project

"Imagine if Libratus was allowed to keep its winnings" --- Ashley_Pomeroy

It would pay its debts: as noted above 19M core hours cost more than the winnings.

Re: The agency is recognized the world over as the most careful and risk-averse space agency.

"Richard Feynman's observations on the Challenger failure are well worth a read" -- Fred Dibnah

As are Edward Tufte's speculations on the role of PowerPoint in the Columbia disaster

cc

The total number of individuals in a cc, after enumerating any groups, should not exceed N.

You could relax this criterion a bit by making it only applicable to replies and/or automatically moving the remaining addressees to bcc and/or being overrideable on confirmation.

I'm not convinced N needs to be much greater than 20.

Re: Never had a single problem. PS4 Pro working perfectly here.

"The muppet of course is the one that believes internet "news" like this, without anything other than a forum thread to back it up."

There appears to be video evidence backing it up.

Today: 299792.458 km/s

Pedantic note: the last measurement in the sequence should be 299792456.2±1.1 m/s from the 1970s

As the majority of the uncertainty was due to that of the length of the metre, the metre was redefined in terms of c and seconds (1975 I think) which is why the current value of 299792458 is exact.

"I now know more about than I ever wanted to – a system known as VoIP, the Voice over Internet protocol." --- Lord Blair

It's amazing people can't die of shame --- I nearly passed out just reading that nonsense.

9 upvotes but ...

... Mrs Uk_Gadget clearly reads El Reg

Bog Roll

like this, perhaps? Not sure it would give you that "Andrex feeling of clean"

Doesn't have to be a circle ...

... other shapes are available (NB: moderately NFSW)

Re: Google docs spreadsheet with Ransomware info

"Seriously, if you can only safely open links by going through a sandbox or temporary VM, you are either doing it wrong, or have the stupidest OS setup going, and should not be acceseing the internet with it in the first place."

I absolutely agree that it *should* not be the case that browsing to a link should be able to compromise your machine, but unfortunately, time and again, it has been shown to be possible, even with properly installed and maintained operating systems. Suggesting that people don't click on unknown links, at least without taking precautions, is hardly "overly paranoid advice" let alone "showboating" or "grandstanding."

And where does the Daily Mail come into it?

Re: WTF?

"Where does insecure systems come into play here when you are the person that was given that information in the first place before you enter that into the company's car hire system? [...] also noted down the customer details separately, probably on a post-it, to be sold on, " --- AC

"Details of tens of thousands of the company's customers and sold them on for hundreds of thousands of pounds" ---TFA

Seems unlikely to me that the mechanism for selling that quantity of records is Post-Its; a pound to a penny we're talking USB sticks or other portable media and taking details in bulk from "databases" (which may be nothing more than spreadsheets) rather than filching them one at a time.

Re: Rolf?

What do you mean by suggesting that Capricorn One is an "alternative perspective" --- it's not a documentary you know!

Re: suck it darwin

"so, we've figured a way to beat natural selection ... if you have a fatal genetic issue, then would have taken that as a signal ..." -- chewyfruitloop

Natural selection cannot be beaten: in this case the "fatal genetic issue" is no longer fatal thanks to a change in the environment (the availability of technological remediation). Genes don't send signals --- they impact the reproducibility of the genome they are part of or, if they don't, they drift randomly through the population over time.

Re: Calling BS

"I'm sure it's a percent or two slower than a pure C program, but for the short development time I can cope with that."

As a performance specialist, it's a shame I can only upvote this once. >95% of performance issues can be improved by improving the code (data architecture, etc), and the sooner you've got the code working the sooner you can start. When you get down to could I use a faster language you frequently aren't far from the making the choice of just using faster hardware just as appealing, if not more so.

Re: replaced them with an AI editor.

" ... then we could all go away and do something more productive"

seems unlikely; Many of us work in IT.

Re: Clippy

Bob