With apologies to Mr. Lehrer
" The rocket goes up
Who cares what it lands on?
That's not my department
Said Mr. Elon."
101 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Feb 2008
So back in about 2014 I was doing a bit of jobhunting on the side and a recruitment agency called me to set me up for an online test for a company called Phorm.
"That name sounds familiar" I thought and looked them up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm
Having looked them up I decided I had no intention of working for them but I'd do the online test for practice.
Then I got a phone interview. Again, I had no intention of working for that company but hey, interview practice and it might be fun..
The interview consisted mostly of the interviewer trying to persuade me that the company wasn't bad really and I shouldn't believe everything i read on the internet about them.
He sounded increasingly desperate as the interview went on and if it hadn't been a phone interview I would have been laughing in his face.
The even more fun thing about this was Phorm ceased trading a full three years before the company I was working for did.
After having my Ubuntu installation demand I signed up to Ubuntu Pro just to complete the update I was doing, and making me jump through bloody hoops in order to do that I'm rather less keen on that than I used to be, so I'm looking at other distros right now. Was thinking of going to Mint which I last tried in late 2022, but wanted to check out other things first.
Some of the comments here have been quite informative in terms of what not to try!
Twitched at the mention of Clipper, as one of my first jobs at that company was to replace some crappy Clipper code used for data entry (type in 15 numbers. Make a typo, do the lot again) with something more user friendly.
We did have one piece of code I wrote in about 1994 which I discovered to my horror was still being used by our data department twenty years later. And I'd lost the source code.
At the company I used to work for I fixed a couple of Y2K Bugs in the software I was responsible for, and our other developers did likewise.
The way we did it was an epic fudge and we just hoped by the time the shit hit the fan none of us would be working there.
Which was lucky, as the company went into liquidation before the fudge went wrong.
at the very least it could have flown at air shows like Spitfires, etc
Even if both Airbus and Rolls Royce both offered their support, the cost of getting one back into an airworthy condition would have been ridiculously high, and even if it was successfully restored and granted a certificate of airworthiness, nobody would be particularly impressed by seeing one wallow around in slow flight trim.
But that would never happen, there's an immense difference in complexity between Concorde and any WWII warplane and it would be a massive liability.
The Tories have been banging on about ending secure encryption for decades and now and again someone took them aside and told them what that would mean, - no safe online banking, no safe online shopping, etc - and it got shelved. But the current bunch are incompetent evil and completely bonkers enough to actually do it.
Cue tech companies blocking the UK and fleeing the country.
"Boffin" always strikes me as one of those very old-fashioned terms, and brings up mental images of Michael Redgrave bouncing balls off the birdbath with some bungee, or a character from a Heath Robinson cartoon with big tufts of hair either side of a bald dome, wearing several pairs of glasses at once, shirt collar sticking out at unkempt angles and shirt buttons in danger of bursting off as they create a strange device using lots of knotted pieces of string.
It comes across as old-fashioned, very silly and a bit derogatory. Not really a word that belongs in today's lexicon.
Augh, I can see that now.
"Keep Calm and Carry On" becomes an NFT! As do Spitfires and Routemasters.
The idea would be a disgrace to the Royal Mint, sounding more like something from one of those dubious sounding Channel Islands "Mint" companies shilling insanely tacky-looking coronation coins on some Freeview channels.
There's always the idea that this kind of image replacement tech could be used for other purposes. Say you go on holiday and the background of one of your holiday snaps includes a famous landmark building. A dialog pops up saying that if you don't pay the fee to use the image of that building, the camera will remove it from the image. That's going to happen. Take a selfie with your favourite celeb, pay t the fee to capture their image, or you're on your own in the shot. Government don't want you to capture evidence of wrongdoing? Well you're not going to be able to photograph that with your phone.
Banning strong encryption is like raising the firewalls and saying "No Internet Please, We're British".
Tories have been going on about this since Cameron's government and I suspect people have had to take them aside and explain things slowly and clearly.
Ban strong encryption, put backdoors in it, and that's fucked online banking, online shopping, online privacy and anything that requires a secure login. Companies will just block the UK rather than make special exceptions for the benefit of this septic isle.
Yep, It was the start of my second year at junior school (so 1968) that the classrooms were festooned in posters about metric units and we were issued new rulers and textbooks, to start learning metric there and then. (God, I'm old).
So anyone in the UK who doesn't understand metric is either a bit of a dunce, left school before then and learned nothing since, or is being deliberately ridiculous (*cough* Rees-Mogg *cough*).
It's a crying shame the UK didn't go 100% metric by the late 70s. We could have had ten years for people to get used to it, and to go replacing road signs and pub glasses etc, then phased out the last remnants of the ridiculously baroque imperial measure before the end of the 70s.
Yeah, that title does include me. As someone who watched every bit of Apollo footage from back in the day watching the three big red and white parachutes as the capsule slowly descended to splashdown was pretty much a nostalgia thing. Sure, it seems like a backward step from the Shuttle, but wings on a spacecraft are just wasted weight and this can go beyond lower Earth orbit.
That said, would we learn any more from sending people up in this than from sending a robot probe which doesn't need food, water, or air? Especially if the plan is (as it was back in the olden days) to continue to Mars where the time taken to get there would disadvantage fragile meatbags much more.
If I ruled the internet I would make the business models of clickbaity adverting companies illegal.
You know, stuff like:-
"What " + $YOUR_DEMOGRAPHIC + "living in " + $YOUR_TOWN +" need to know about " + $DEMOGRAPHIC_ISSUE +"."
or
"You won't believe what " + $ACTRESS_POPULAR_IN_1980S + "looks like now!"
and so on
Sites where on any specific page maybe 25% is content, and the rest is just ads.
Adblock is great, but when I recently installed a Pi-Hole that was even better, with on average a quarter of all DNS requests being blocked, not just ads but tracking.
(other DNS blocking proxies are probably available)
If you're doing something that involves a lot of entering numbers, then a number pad is an essential thing.
If you're not entering lots of numbers a lot of the time, then dispensing with the number pad saves a lot of space on your desk.
That said, while I don't enter a lot of numbers these days I still miss a number pad on my crappy wireless Mac keyboard. I also miss proper keyboards with proper keys - which this logitech ain't.
The problem with this particular keyboard seems to me that the keys aren't concave and there's no rake to the keyboard.
*sigh* - I still think the absolute pinnacle of keyboard design was the IBM Model M keyboard. I had one of those at work once and it was a pleasure to type on.
My sole experience of Occam was writing an program in it for an assignment at the University of Essex back in t'day. The whole concept of defining program structure by the number of spaces at the start of a line struck me as THE MOST obsessive nonsense ever.
This is probably why I've never got on with Python.