Posts by Joe Werner 300 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2008
still mourn the loss of my Windows phone - a cheap Lumia. It was very usable, intuitive even. The issue with the missing apps was a bit of a bummer, I'll admit that. I still prefer the general system / interface over my droids or the iPhones some friends have. It is so simple even my mom can use it!
When I tell this my colleagues I get weird looks: I'm one of the few Linux users in our department (one of two, I think).
Even for adults I would suggest the "young readers" novels set on "the chalk" - they are incredibly well written - and the Wee Free Men (fairies... sorts of - and also the name of the first book) are really fun to read out loud (as a non-native speaker I sort of have to do that to understand them, Crivens!)
Well, that might be partly due to the connection speed, but mostly it is the mobification and scriptification of the websites. A website that pulls in scripts from two dozen sources to just display the frontpage of whatever is slow and annoying (plus the layout is now for mobile devices, even if there is an app, and to see anything interesting you have to scroll past the full width banner with some f'ing slideshow of stupid irrelevant pictures, which again eats resources and data like crazy, and then there are more full width and full pc-screen height banners down there).
Sorry - yes, I'm annoyed, why do you ask? But yes, connection speed is of course the main culprit *shakes head*
Yes, ElReg, we are so much looking at you. Serve me ads, by all means, I do understand the need for revenue. Make them static pictures, I'd be happy to have them displayed. But if you think you need to display animated, noisy, self resizing, bandwidth-guzzling crap then I'll keep the ad blocker activated. Sorry.
Oh yeah, academia. I'll quit that show: I'm a good scientist (cleverworker or whatever you wrote - cell phone makes commenting a mess!), but I have fuck all ambition to be a manager. If a university (or whatever) would hire me as an overingeniør (senior engineer) to do what I'm good at I'll take it. Unfortunately those jobs are 1) rare and 2) not in my "career path" (as they say...)
A professor is nowadays mostly a mediocre manager (who used to be a good scientist) and that's not my motivation in this spiel.
> I challenge anybody at all to get anybody at all over 65 to say that anything at all is "awesome". Asking
> whether its "a great idea" might get more traction.
My thoughts exactly. Even if I'm not yet approaching that age...
With age you also tend to be more careful, less enthusiastic about the latest fad, critical of promised easy solutions. Plus ElReg readers are bitter, very bitter, when it comes to new technologies, we all had our fair share of disappointment and anger and madness.
F*** I mean I really cannot remember most of that. Since Europe is so small you drive like 200km and you are in a different country. I have been traveling a lot inside Europe the last decades, so I'd probably need to call my friendly neighbourhood spooks to look up where I went ;)
(not that this would be applicable - yet - to Europeans)
... but I do see the point in them. As news websites (aming others) as run as a business they need to generate income to pay the authors, the hosting, etc. Without ads, either it disappears behind a paywall or it disappears completely. Thus, ads can be a good thing (well... necessary evil).
Also, a new product needs to be sold to people. Ads can help with that, though I largely try to ignore them. If they are really bad I also just won't buy the product. I'm not really sure if online ads really do cut it though.
Additionally, the more I read about the online ad market the more broken and ineffective it seems...
... is a bane, the mobeification of the web (you know, wide banners and lots of pics to scroll through when using an actual pc) really ticks me off. Websites that were once usable are now ugly and devoid of easily accessible content. One of the problems are the very different aspect ratios of the devices, and text size of course. And the average teen's attention span...
@Mikel: ElReg has a mobile version of its website, works (for me) as good as the "normal" one. Put a "m." in front of theregister.co...
"Vast majority of extensions that people use will carry on just fine."
Well, good for the vast majority. I like for example tab groups (like in Opera... way back when dirt was invented), and a few other things. One of the developers actually put out a notice that he won't migrate, because he cannot see a way to do it (with a reasonable amount of effort, after doing the migration to whatever their last thing was about a year ago - and the new environment would actually not support things like that any more). All because Firefox wants to be more like Chrome and use the same plugins / extensions (no, it is not the only reason, I followed the discussions a bit - but it breaks the browser for me...).
So... time to look for a new browser. Again. f- them, with extreme prejudice. I'm getting old and averse to change (plus if I cannot get the functionality I want it really sucks - and there is just no alternative but the old and outdated Opera version that still was Opera and not Chrome).
After they took away the convenient distinction between the site's cookies and third party etc. they should STFU. Now they break the plugin system and the extensions as well, and slowly turn into a bland chrome lookalike. Like Opera. And like Opera it will soon be unusable for me in its current version.
Progress for the f'ing sake of f'ing progress. I am not impressed... Thank you oh so bloody much.
Nobody (well... close enough) cares what I do - if I get the job(s) done, that is. If I write and maintain a set of scripts that do the monkey work for me and I'm done early then I can get away with many things. On the other hand: If the scripts bork, I did not check the results, stuff breaks down and I goofed off instead of checking stuff bloody works as it bloody should I will reap the whirlwind - rightly so, should not complain.
Thus: check your work. Double check it. Make sure you really are done and stuff really works as intended. Oh, that's a lot of work you say? Yes. It is. No, then you cannot play WoW or whatever.
Well, it is more modern than what was (10y ago or so...) my PhD supervisor's favourite program for typesetting: exp. That was always a major hassle to get this to run (on any "modern" machine and OS, more recent than Win95), also so that one could export his "slides" (etc.) to something in a more... eh... common format (yes, print to a file works in principle, but this DOS program was a bit bitchy when it came to printer drivers).
students should be required to use slide rules for a while. You only get the mantissa, not the exponent. Yes, I am joking about this one (but only because there are other ways to teach that).
Students and their calculators, great fun (or not). My two pet peeves are:
- ignorance about the magnitude of the results (like here...)
- ignorance about the precision of the results. Say you measure a bike wheels diameter to calculate the circumference. You get 71cm. Student punches the number into the pocket calculator and writes down all 12 or whatever digits of the result, down to atomic nuclei sizes.
Yeah, what about having a fast, nimble browser, you know, like Opera *used* to be? With some really useful features (tab groups, mouse gestures, inbuilt rss reader, ...).
Signs of getting old:
- "in my days.."
- "like it used to be"
- o tempora, o mores
(and I had sworn myself not to do this)
Thanks, but no thanks. I had family members (grandfather and his father, in those... interesting times) picked up to be driven to an election. Both did not want to vote, as they felt the outcome was rigged anyway (it was), so they did not see the point. No further trouble ensued, but it very well could have.
When people complain about politics I usually ask them if they did vote. Unless they in fact did vote I tell them to shut up. We need to hammer this message home: Unhappy with the situation? Go and vote, make a difference, at least actively tell them you are unhappy. I know I often face the situation where I do not agree with enough of what the parties have in their program to really vote for any of them, but in the end I (try to) make a balanced decision (even if it is to spoil the ballot).
You are right, of course, that turnout should be much higher.
"Only a stubborn technology utopian can now argue that social networks, playgrounds for rage and virtue signalling, have elevated political discussion. Personally, I think they have been catastrophic for rational debate, hollowing out the middle ground."
Yes. Oh, so much. Forget about the swarm intelligence, the democratization of everything through digital whatevers. Compromises, discussions, diplomacy, all these things are positively absent. Not only in social media, but also in article comments (m'kay, sort of social-media-ish, I guess). ElReg is mostly an exception - except when it comes to politics (only recently, please for the love of $DEITY, stop it), or OS choices with the overzealous Linux-evangelists, the fanbois, MS slavedroids (I'm used to that, usually ignore it, sometimes read it for entertainment).
Lucky me: heading for the official drinking soon, need that. What a week.
The problem (I observe this in my home nation as well - at a lesser extent) is that congress blocked ideas because of party politics - not only for Obama (as briefly mentioned in the article, when the author was not busy with name calling). In other countries the parliament can be blocked by another chamber or even a single person. The German president refused to sign some laws a few years back, he felt they were against the constitution (usually this is a formality). Since most democratic countries have some sort of checks and balances, giving one person or group a way of removing these is not without danger. It can and will be abused. On the other hand blocking something just because you can and the person / group proposing belongs to another party is also bad and against the intent of the constitution (whatever it is called). The art of finding compromises is really endangered. Balanced decisions are sacrificed for party politics - by all sides.
The article however is a bad piece of bad propaganda - or flamebait. Using "duh... cronies" several times is really not the hallmark of... journalism. It will mostly feed the trolls.
I went shopping last year for a replacement for the netbook I had been using for five years (screen issues...). Requirements were easy enough, or so I thought (tl;dr: I found it impossible)
- size (10")
- battery life (8hrs)
- hard disk (500 GB)
- keyboard, so not a tablet-thingy with a rubbery excuse for a keyboard missing essential keys
- runs GNU/Linux, this is for me to work on after all.
Oh, and a decent price. For the old one I paid 300€. The size is important when commuting, try opening anything larger on a train or plane (economy class). HDD because I drag around quite an amount of (work related) data. Went for a poor compromise in the end.
So: yeah, no small, cheap note-/netbooks - already last year.
My thinking exactly. (though tab-using heathens should burn like the vermin they are ;p - but the version control system should actually take care of that so you don't have to worry - and you are using one, right?). The reaction we have at (tab vs. space) at first is 1) strong 2) disproportionate 3) typical and 4) stupid - let's face it: I could have spat lace patterns into iron plates as well.
Trevor really describes the problems well that some (most?) of us have. They say that acknowledging your shortcomings is the first step to solve them. Here's to us (raises $icon) really tackling those real and serious issues and no longer be carried away by the childish flamewars we are prone to end up in.
From a mailing list: "so the Ogre (list admin) tells us we cannot be Trolls", wrote one of the participants in the flamewar / rule-lawyering djihad. This really defused the situation.
... but back then I wanted the absolute control, the tinkering, the challenge. Now I use Linux because I am tired of borked updates, tweaking, etc. I did learn a lot (especially about rebuilding the system after not so brilliant ideas of mine), but now I want the machine to do as I want (not as I say, i.e. not allow me to do certain things to the OS). More modern distros are like that. What was the quote I read a while ago? "Along with it [unix] came a set of disgustingly dangerous utilities that meant nothing, but could render a system useless within seconds" (or something like that).
The package installation routines in Debian, the whole apt-framework is just amazing. It does not leave the system in an undefined state (unlike what Mandrake and Suse and others do). I would not want to lose that. I also think that the distribution installation scripts in Debian were pretty good already 10 years ago, pressing [return] a few times, entering a machine name and creating a user was the only interaction you needed (I still partitioned - still do - by hand, which added a few steps, also the initial package selection is now often braindead). That was the basic install, mind, still devoid of any useful software - or a desktop gui. Getting X11 to run was a major headache in those days. If the graphics adapter was newer than one or three years you had to run at least Debian testing (if not unstable), and I had unstable break on me a few times, but I could have avoided that (three flavours of Debian: rusty, stale and broken... still like using it, mostly because "stable" really means something).
What one has to admit is that the arch forums / wiki / online documentation are really helpful (also to users of other distributions - if you roughly know what you are doing). Totally agree on that.
Have you ever been to Norway or Switzerland (that until... 10 years ago, I guess). Cars are required to stop for pedestrians - and the drivers actually do so! It feels quite weird the first year or so, but it does indeed work. Seriously, pedestrians in Norway cross without looking. And - I have to stress that - it really does work.
On the sidewalk on the other hand people do play chicken. This is super nasty...
Beer, 'cause I need one and it is 10GBP in the pub
I think the AVM FritzBox has something like a "physical handshaking" process. You can buy (could, at least) USB WLAN sticks to go with the access point. To configure them for your network, you would plug them into the FritzBox. This would load the SSID and authentication information onto it (supposedly, I don't own their stuff). This sounds like a no-fuss process, very accessible, very simple. Unfortunately not so easy to do this with a phone or 'slab. Especially if some companies insist on having a very strange connector, the design of which they also change, rendering equipment useless.
Yes, this is not a perfect method, but if somebody has physical access to the network equipment that should not have it you have other problems.
This *was* the test for the actual payload (rover) in 2020 under the correct conditions. Pretty tough to simulate the journey with nasty conditions plus the atmospheric conditions during the descent, right? I am sure they tested the rocket engines on Earth, and the computer systems as well.
It is disappointing, but hey, it made it there - and the Schiaparelli impactor was i) budged on last minute and ii) really just a test platform. It would have given interesting data on martian storms, though!
I agree. But to be honest, even a slightly below average height guy like me felt a bit crammed in the original contraption (I sat in the rear seat, trying to be a gentleman and letting the girl sit in front - but then she was almost as tall). The driver loved her mini, and the sportive feel you can have if you do some... modifications.
But yeah, the thought "Mini? No way, it is Maxi!" crossed my mind more than once when seeing the "updated" version. As to the SUV-ised one: WTF?! But then I cannot understand the appeal of SUVs anyway. And new cars in general, with the low window-to-steel ratio - highly impractical, leading to school kids being run over by their moms and the use of rear facing cameras in every single friggin' car and the warning beepers. I mean, are you driving a lorry or what?
Sorry, need a beer (or three). Pub-o-clock, when are you?
Yeah, having the doors kicked down by power-tool-wielding mobs is no fun. Good save, and also what a great computer store! Rolling in and saying you want to test this suitcase of stuff does not sit well with most. Hope you bought them a beer as well (or pushed some business their way). Such places need to stay in business.
(I regularly buy stuff at my local bike shop, the owner has a very nice return policy and lets me borrow his tools. I mailorder a lot, but not all)
as the BOFH said once. You can do the job? You are in. For me this whole age/sex/orientation/whatever is not interesting in a professional context (and if people behave professionally).
I do admit: it is a serious problem if people are discriminated against - no matter what. Unless they are, as Simon put it, "a thicko" and should not be allowed an opinion. But do not think you are better than anybody just because you are white/black/female/middle-aged/christian/pastafarian/whatever.
I know I am too thick in some fields, I make an effort of not pushing my thoughts on those who have a clue (I will ask and try to learn, though).
On the other hand: one of my former female colleagues at university made a point that she was milking the system, and that she was able to get funds etc. just because she was female... this was totally against her "unequal opportunity" policy.
We did pair programming in a class I took a decade (or two...) ago. Simple reason: computers were expensive beasts then. We did not rotate around, but thankfully the guy I got matched up with was intelligent - and we thought in similar ways, which became apparent when we could more or less swap places (only one keyboard) in the middle of a line. This was in the time before syntax highlighting and spell checking etc., and we were able to catch many small things. We also caught each other being too lazy to think about input sanitising, missing possible cases or being ambiguous. I actually miss that. It also helped both of us to be less of a lazy sod (until we finished the tasks, then we goofed off). I *especially* miss this aspect.
...of the article are a bleak outlook, indeed. Basically he says that IoT exists only for the good of the Megacorps. Thanks, I'll skip the cyberware implants and not gain the corruption points - and to think that I once thought I'd make a good Dekker.
"Traitor to humanity, feel my wrath!"
Sounds like vibrating apart. An explosion is caused by a fast, often exothermal reaction that creates a lot of gas very quickly (at least that's what I think an explosion is). Surely this is a bit like one of them old drum storages running in "horizontal mode", happily skipping along the floor...
In the linked article it is written that the USA use the same system... except for the 1pint=16oz and the US gallon (ounce, quart,...) actually being quite smaller than the proper imperial one (right? too lazy to check w'pedia)...
To be honest, I like my beer in the correct size (though the way it is done in Cologne also has its advantages, get a fresh one without asking all the time - but they are only 0.2l)
One of my mates is doing support on one of the higher tiers of an infrastructure provider - they guys 'n' gals you talk to if you are $big_customer (and quite up from the 'restart the machine' ..."help"). His favourite is when whole segments go dark - because copper thieves pinch the fibre. Happened quite a lot a few years back when copper prices were way up.
Copper thieves also stole piping out of my university. Unfortunately this was connect to the He supplies (we have a closed system to re-liquify the stuff for cooling purposes). Damage in copper was low. We lost a lot of He (which is *f'iing expensive*).
(icon 'cause that's how they try to extract the copper from fibre cables)
"Whether it's hearing from your bank about a potentially fraudulent transaction, or getting notified by an airline about a delayed flight, many of us get this information elsewhere, including in text messages and phone calls"
Yeah, except I travel quite a bit and have expensive roaming (Norway...). Receiving an SMS is free, internet access is not. I'll stick with the old system.
And that's before considering the rest...
"the drones need to be kept within line-of-sight at all times"
So the operator / operatress(?) walks along with the drone, which means that instead of the pizza (not that the stuff D's sell is related to that) being delivered by a motorscooter it will arrive at walking speed.
Alternative plans: https://what-if.xkcd.com/149/
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