Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: Never understood some names

Why do our feet smell and our noses run?

Re: chumocracy

I still trust Sturgeon considerably more than any of BoJo or his incompetent yes-men cabinet.

November the 5th is an annoying occasion as every year it feels more and more that we should be celebrating that Guido Fawkes had a really good idea.

Re: Damned if they do, damned if they don't

Adding a delay to the process would not have been good, but the value in supplying known working systems to their intended recipient would likely to have been repaid multiple times over compared to supplying unknown, untested systems.

Obviously not everywhere has the capability, but it really is not hard to stream images to a large number of systems simultaneously. This deploys a known, good image, can even be preconfigured with appropriate links to school educational services and also tests the hardware before delivery. Having to support and track down and replace even one faulty system is going to take some effort and time.

I work for a small enough organisation that having an image streaming setup isn't worth it due to the low churn in devices and therefore how the image would need to be updated individually so often. But we still nuke the supplier's installation and perform a clean install of the OS and required software installations. As a result, we just don't have problems with such systems and their bundled crapware and often really daft non-standard partitioning.

Re: Foot pedal

Previously I had to suffer where some numpty pointedly tried to only order LCD displays which preferably only had fecking VGA connectors! A digitl (pixelmap) image, being mangled through a digital to analogue conversion only to be converted immediately from analogue back to digital for display on a digital (pixelmap) panel? FFS, just dumb in every way. Not a single one of those displays remained within a month or two as they were uniformly rubbish and the office had an entirely random range of display resolutions and mismatched dual monitors on a desk? Eek. It wasn't even remotely hard or expensive to deploy digitally connected monitors running at a uniform 1980x1080p resolution and just the support and usability issues resolved paid for this within a few weeks.

Re: IP reputation goes a long way

AWS are fine with legitimate scans as long as you inform them before doing them.

Re: Just cancel them on mass

This is true, and would be a good thing.

Also removing the appalling and disgusting farce that is presidential pardons - pretty much all Trump did with them in the last few weeks was to pardon a huge swathe of proven criminals that backed him.

Re: No WiFi?

Adding WiFi (in any form) would greatly increase the complexity of the chip. I guess they could license a pre-designed module for inclusion, but that's a further complexity and cost.

It would be interesting though. Using the ESP32/8266 microcontrollers is handy partly because of the wireless connectivity.

Re: Fail safe?

Ok, bad use of terminology. I meant avaition/flying a whole rather than any specific part of it.

And as for human interface usability... most of the current crop of designers seem to have absolutely no clue. It's all about using the latest fad tools to create the latest interface and nothing else seems to matter - usability, accessibility or longevity.

As I read it, it did. It required three taps on a particular icon followed by confirmation in a popup. That's not entirely unreasonable as there is an important balance between really wanting to shut something down in a hurry and preventing accidental shut downs. Maybe it needs to be amended to make it more obvious and to prevent the "pigeon peck" scenario that was comically mentioned above where closing annoying popups has become a standard reaction.

A physical, separate emergency cut off that's easily reachable has been standard in industrial control systems for many years for good resaon.

Re: Fail safe?

The history of avionics is full of post-event learning experiences. This is another one, which was harmless and as long as something is learned from it is not a bad thing.

Re: We all know how to copy/paste

...and utterly unusable without a mouse, i.e. no standard keyboard shortcuts. This is the kind of thing that accessibility is there for - standard and consistent actions using the most basic and reliable interface methods.

If you can define when an individual stops being a scientist and is an engineer, then please do, add in Maths as well then it becomes even messier. The extremes are easy but there is a very grey area in between therefore this report is quite inclusive. The number of S and M(!) left out of the report is very low.

perhaps suggesting that women are well represented at the design & management levels, but less so at the oily rag end.

That's a positive interpretation of this, unfortunately it's been reported that women have to be more academically qualified than their male colleagues to be taken seriously and this is backed up as the comparison is largely the same across all levels. It's also regional, and interesting that some of the regions that are often traditionally considered as engineering regions perform worse than those that are not. It does vary by age as well and in most regions of the country the ratio of female to male in younger people is better. It's a very slow work in progress.

Source: https://www.engc.org.uk/publications/mapping-the-uks-engineering-workforce/

The report does not include science and maths but these are rather small compared to overall engineering and the extent of cross over in these fields will mean that many working in science and/or maths have been picked up in this analysis. Women in Science or Maths are poorly represented although this situation is encouragely improving in these two fields. Women in engineering and technology is low but slowly improving.

I made it very clear that it is a very crudely and oversimplified example, it was more to demonstrate that applying time based events to a standing pool and expecting immediate changes does not work even mathematically.

STEM in India is expanding, but it's also not a small starting industry either. Change in the representation of females in STEM industries is a generational thing and is slow and the other societal impacts have to be taken into account too. It's positive that it is changing and improving though, even in the UK, but expecting 40% of graduates to equate to 40% of workers in anything less than 20-30 years is silly and that's before societal impacts come into play. it doesn't mean that we shouldn't push for more equality though.

Re: Future proofing size constraints

From memory this was also due to die size, possibly complexity too, and therefore also a significant cost saving.

Re: you can't just conjure medical professionals from thin air.

Yes, you can. Our beloved dictator did this when he announced all the "new" nurses for the NHS. Many of which were retired, with little desire to return (odd that), or were already being trained, and therefore not new. Restating previous things as if they are new is a very common occurence of the current rabble.

Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

To be fair (yes, I know), a large part of the problem is the reality of life for politicians.

Politicians have a job and bills to pay and families to support. If they are voted out of power, for whatever reason, then they no longer have a job and are no longer able to pay their bills. If they don't follow their party line, regardless of how disgusting and wrong it may be, they lose "the whip", and the chances are very high that when it comes to the next election they will be out of a job. Party politics is very damaging to democracy.

These are strong pressures and it's no wonder that everything is very short term. There's usually no value in it for the politician for long term policies and these would have to survive any following politicial changes, therefore the policies have to be shaped by what will keep the politician in a job come election time. This frequently means lies, rabble rousing and utterly broken promises, or party manifestos as they are called. These really should be legally binding but any lies can be spouted in these and then ignored later. It's also no wonder why politicians are to be found trying to cover themselves for eventual job loss, because it will happen to most of them eventually, and doing this through their connections and friends and any other way possible. It would be a scary thing to come out of a job in politics with no especially relevant or practical skills and therefore little to no employability. Some politicians are actually quite reasonable and decent people. These tend to be "back benchers" though.

About the only way to fix politics would be change this reality of life in politics.

Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

One reason is having read so much Pratchett, any mention of Johnson immediately translates mentally into Bloody Stupid Johnson.

Also, because BoJo has played on being the clown for years and is quite good at this. Considerably better than being in any position of responsibility.

Re: playing with the politics of pandemics

Calling BoJo the Clown the "Prime Minister" would imply that anyone thinks that he is remotely up to the task of typing his own shoe laces, or could be trusted to do so. He can't and isn't. BoJo's single priority in life is himself, nothing else or anybody else matters. Start looking at him from this perspective and it becomes quite easy to see how all his (in)actions fall into place. If he does anything for anyone else, it's only in the perspective of what it brings him personally.

Despite all of this, he's not as bad as Trump. Which really goes to show just how bad Trump is.

Re: Yet again - zero bounds checking

Without wanting to touch on the idiotic near-religious flame war that is exception vs error handling... the default approach, because it's lazy as hell, is to do no error handling at all and just let exceptions handle everything. Doesn't matter if it's a relatively expected error, it will be left to raise a cascade of meaningless exceptions until some unfortunate component in the stack-o-horrors traps the exception and will duly mask it with the ever helpful "an error has occurred" message and then fail.

Re: Facebook

The bugs and weird behaviours at occur in facebook's mobile app and web front-end often suggest that the architecture is an unholy un-tamable mess

Well... this was company that confused the relatively simple job of using HTML5 with creating an unwieldy unusable JavaScript driven horror shit show and eventually had to vomit up a semi-cross platform native app. Which they paid mobile phone manufacturers to embed on phones in a largely non-removable way.

Creating unwieldy unusable JavaScript driven horror shit shows is what the "smart kids" are pretending are web apps these days...