Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
Of *course* gravity is required. It just *isn't* the fiucking mechanism that sorts cornflakes.
My *point* being that liquid oil's position in the vertical geo table *should* be governed by comparative density and do the exact opposite of what the article is claiming, or vulcanism theory is falsified.
Christ on a bike.
Cornflakes settle the way they do by turbulent particle sorting when the box is shaken, not by "gravity". Left alone the small cornflakes will stay put.
How does this "heavy on top" theory stack against petrologocal theories that account for magma flows using conventional views on comparative material densities?
"Comey also questioned whether people were not being a little too emotional about the whole issue, commenting that we all leave so much "digital dust" about ourselves on social media sites that there was very little need for the FBI to get involved in extreme device hacking scenarios."
Then what the fuck was all the FBI-generated fuss about in the first place, you disingenuous bastard?
"... hackers are expanding their working hours "
Same tactic as Julius Caesar used when invading Britain according to Asterix in Britain. Upon finding that the Britons stopped fighting at four o'clock each weekday so they could drink hot water, and refused to fight at all on weekends, J.C. campaigned only during those times resulting in victory for the invaders.
I believe the proper response was given by a commentator at the time (in translation): "Oh I say. The cads!"
But DHS is after all a Bush-era construct, desinged in a time of "tell them nothing" and "We have nothing to fear but everything". The most explicit statement permissable is "credible threat" under the Bush doctrine, which can be summed up as "the Vietnam war was lost in the newspapers. Therefore we win by not telling people what is going on".
I thought Everyone Knew the Chinese are bingo fanatics. All one has to do is mention bingo and they are reduced to helplessness as they gibber "bingo!" over and over. So every email should include a mention of the word somewhere to attempt to provoke the reader into a bingo-crazed response, the receiving of which would clearly show that one was not in fact in contact with the CFO but rather a wily luxuriantly-mustached Chinaman in a silk kimono and pillbox hat.
There are about three people in my enterprise of over 500 who wear their badge as demanded in the Official Memo Re Badges: all the time and above the waist.
The managers typically wear them clipped to a belt (against policy) and the rest, including 100% of the consultants, never display them.
Not only os this a security nightmare, it is fucking rude. How in hell am I supposed to know your name when I need to ask you a question in a meeting?
But now the SAs are insisting on deploying sudo "for security". On some servers. Only for certain staff. And not the SAs.
HASP * in action.
* Half-Arsed Security Procedures. Not intended as anything but a sardonic kick in the nuts from them-wot-can to Teh Luzerz.
"Apparently he's already stated that he's going with George (VII) because the previous Charles had a bit of a reputation."
But couldn't that be said of everyone during the restoration? Even Edward Scissorhands died with a tin nose and a sore willy from all the rogering and poetry as I remember it.
I don't agree with allowing monarchs to pick a name. It's not like they are the Pope (Henry VIII's shenanigans notwithstanding). Charles III could rebrand the Chaz marque for a new millennium. I mean, I'm sure Mary would have liked to pick something like "Melissa" so the schoolkids of the future wouldn't keep confusing her with the Queen of Scots woman, but she didn't.
If he picks "George" He'll be just another in a long line. Besides, that would put him up against the beloved George VI when it comes to legacy building. An asymptotically steep problem curve, that.
George VI stuck it out in London when the buzz-bombs were raining down and went Out Among The (Adoring) People afterwards, whereas George VII will start out as the bloke wot rejected Diana, mostest bestest popular princess ever so he could knock off his old girlfriend. With that millstone I reckon he'd be better stacking himself against a dissolute rake with a curly wig.
All that groundwork for a badge wasted. Now "sanwin" will have to be retired and the process begun anew.
As for the coloring book article, well, it was so uninteresting I didn't even attempt to read it. If you are going to do an El Reg April Fool you have to do some serious hot-button pressing in the headline to pull in the punters:
Apple Sue Fitbit in Wrist Tat Brickbat
or SCO Win Landmark Decision In IBM Linux Lawsuit
or Microsoft To Quietly Retire Windows 10: Replacement "Windows 20/20" O/S in Beta (Subtitle: New O/S To Feature native VR Integration via Windows RealWorld(tm) SDK).
And have you considered that the Royal Mint is possibly setting the whole nation, nay the world up for the most awesome April Fool of 2017?
"Human beings define civilization as the distance between them and their excrement.
The aliens define civilization as their proximity to their excrement."
Paraphrased from the book jacket blurb from an early 1970s NEL edition of The Dark Light Years by Brian Aldiss.
My copy has a spiffy Bruce Pennington cover too. Bonus.
Yes. So much less better than a semi-colon needed wherever it isn't forbidden or (shudders at thought of debugging a rookie edit on important code) significant leading white space.
If you need a real reason to hate Cobol that isn't completely fatuous and based on erroneous axioms, they are actually periods, not "full stops" because Cobol is an American computer language. Let the xenophobia begin!
But then again so are C [insert flavour of the month], Java and perl. Oh well.
But you do with 1100-80 compiled ANSI Cobol 77, which is what I was trying to write.
You'd compile it with someting like @ACOB,CRYPES KRIKEY*WHATTA.TARD01
If you felt so inclined and had a Grey Goddess lying around somewhere.
You might need to say UPON CONSOLE rather than ON CONSOLE. I haven't written any Cobol since the late 1980s.
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. TARD01.
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
SOURCE-COMPUTER. UNIVAC 1100-80.
OBJECT-COMPUTER. UNIVAC 1100-80.
DATA DIVISION.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY "HELLO WORLD" ON CONSOLE.
Eight lines. Might need a WORKING_STORAGE and a dummy 77 level data item to compile elsewhere, for ten lines. Needs more verbage if compiled in UCOB because the class of '86 wanted to make everything look like Fortran for some reason, but not more than four or five lines.
Trade in your CS lambskin, and stop making pronouncements from the mountain of "everyone knows" based on the one course you took and slept through. Your "famous" source is full of snot and one who is frightened by any language that looks different from the C-Like pap he/she learned to digest at school to boot. I make rude noises in both your directions.
8op 8ob 8op
Thrrrrrrrrrrrrrp!
The stories came about because most people who tried the Newton's handwriting recognition did so in shops
Well, much damage must have been done by the Doonesbury plot line that had Mike buying one and then failing to get it to record anything accurately. I don't imagine Trudeau did that from anything but personal experience.
I bought something in a New York musicians store years ago and all the sales were conducted using Newtons. They seemed to have no problem, but they were using what would be now called an App.
Of course, everyone who has pointed out that SJ was not at Apple during the Newton era is right. My memory is obviously at fault on that detail, but I do remember being told that the Graffiti product was a Newton-born affair that was discarded.
Discarded Ideas drove a bunch of portable device innovations - the Handspring Visor was made by people who left Palm when 3COM took over and had a differing vision of the Future of the Handheld Device.
Mea Culpa on the erroneous SJ blaming.
The problem that killed off the Newton prematurely was the fast spreading stories concerning the handwriting recognition's legendary ability to take anything you tried to write and morph it into something almost but not entirely unlike anything you intended.
I was told by a Palm insider some years ago that had Mr Jobs not insisted on the handwriting recognition the Newton would have shipped with Graffiti, the bedrock on which Palm later built a monster. Imagine the consequences of that.
And though almost everyone who saw Graffiti in use thought it difficult to use, just about everyone who actually tried it found to their surprise that it was intuitive and easy. I owned a Handspring Visor and loved the way I could hold a conversation with someone and take minutes without looking at the screen or my hands and end up with a readable and accurate record of whatever was being discussed.
Had the Newton been fitted with Graffiti instead of handwriting recognition as its primary screen-to-text mechanism it not only would have lived longer it might well have prospered. I might even have owned one.
I was once privileged to be part of a DBA conference call with my clueless colleagues in a more-rural-than-my-site head office who were outraged that their upperest mostest boss had brought in outsiders to do a logical database design. "We've been trained to do that! Why bring in that shower?" they cried in unison.
"I'll hazard a guess" I said, rising to the challenge. "I'll bet it's becuase we have the reputation that by the time we've figured out how to address a user requirement it doesn't matter any more".
I was made to sit in the uncooperative corner. But it was worth it. I was championing Relational Database Technology (all caps because it was A Cause) in an effort to defeat that very perception in our user base, but had recently been told by my head of department that for the next project he wasn't at all interested in discussing speed of delivery, and that relational databases were a ( and I quote) a passing fad.
You can't argue with facts like that.
By a curious coincidence, xeno-archeologists on the planet Lambda Aurigae IV are also in the process of an exciting new viking discovery.
In their case it's the sudden onslaught of radio-frequency signals that when decoded go:
Spam,spam-spam-spam
Spam,spam-spam-spam
Spam,spam-spam-spam Glorious spam, magnificent spam!
Spam,spam-spam-spam Surgical spam, splendiferous spam!
Told ya. RICO Act rides again.
Law enforcement says "special law use case" and you should be hearing "Swiss Army Civil Rights Workaround".
There used to be an old joke with the punchline "Coppers is cunning bastards", but my take is coppers is lazy bastards just like everyone else. Shortest path to the prize wins every time and damn the consequences.
"Apple. It just works."
When you lock down something so tight it squeaks, then "upgrade" it so sadly, you deserve a figurative kick in the hurtybits.
And #downloads != #installs. My device has been nagging me for days but luckily I saw the Reg article before I let it loose.
"if people could see – which they obviously can’t "
Because of the blanket top secret "laws" put in place by you and you ilk, Mr Hague. If you are so assured of the correctness of your position, how about letting the public review the warrants YOU signed off on and the things that were done sans warrant that you agreed to.
But I imagine that is an entirely different use case.
Caroline Pidgeon, leader of the London Assembly Liberal Democrats who put the question to the Mayor, told The Register the Met has a poor track record with technology, which has held back officers' ability to tackle crime.
Hang on, I thought not being able to break into people's iPhones at whim was what held back officers' ability to tackle crime.
What was the Vista fuss about?
Ooooh, lessee, could it be the hours it took to install and configure? I did an XP install in about 30 minutes, from open the box to browsing the web. When asked to help with a Vista install I allocated two hours, stayed for three and a half and had to leave with the job still unfinished.
Or maybe it was the need for a Microsoft Passport to be set up, and the password for it to be demanded at regular intervals as the bundled app suites installed? \Or maybe it was the stupidity of even having supplied a passport credential and a license key, having to type in a sixteen digit CD license code AS WELL before the (windows bundled) MS Works (ha!) would start to install.
The experience was useful; I avoided Vista like the proverbial plague ever after.
My ideal phone would work as, you know, A PHONE without me having to shout or pronounce words like I'm recording an Edison-Bell wax cylinder using only the amplification of the exponential horn to do so.
I had this in 1995 on my analog Motorola. Is it so fucking hard to make the digital cell phone voice reception and transmission quality as good as that?
Nice one, Dave. Short, sweet, to the point and factually correct.
An object lesson in how to communicate complex ideas with simple methodologies so that they are understandable for a user.
And while I agree that salt techniques are important, I disagree with a commentor that they were "missing" from this document. That subject belongs on a follow-up article.
I'm bookmarking this so I can share it with interns and new hires.
Have beer.
"There's no "jump back".
See, for me there is. 60 years of CS development, working back from 2016, gives you the baseline of around 1955ish. The appeal of Fascism was at that time ten years out of favour owing to a small problem of a world war ravaging, well, the world because of, well, fascists looking for elbow room and payback for wrongs done 'em in 1919.
Didn't think I'd have to explain that, but there we go.
" If you read her tweets or those of the people she interacted with as being serious, more fool you."
I was referring to the bot and the way people were singing it up as "AI". I got what was going on, and even why. You see, I've been working with computers for a very long time now and have seen that particular party trick pulled on a "turing test" bot quite a few times - the first in the 1970s with a bot running on an ICL 1904 when I was a student.
In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that if one of us is taking things too seriously with regard to this stupid bot, it isn't the one typing right now. I'm not the one anthropomophising a bunch of code.
The headline is not as clever as you thought - remove the word "see" and it scans properly phonetically & punny (but no longer makes strict grammatical sense in English).
As for Google and Facebook, all we can assume from their publicity is that their racist AI's keep their cards closer to their circuitboards than the Microsoft one did.
Good to see that 60 years of Computer Science results in a speedy jump backward in terms of political philosophy.
Presumably the shortarsed pilots run the risk of being fired through the canopy before it clears the way, while the chubmeisters will just end up sitting in the now open-air cockpit while the rockets fill the surrounding space with flames and smoke.
The problem here is probably that the software is being written to the same standard as that for the commercial market - release one is the beta. God help the astronaut trying to land a LM with modern day code on board. No chance of being overwhelmed by data flow as per Apollo 11 thanks to ultra-enspiffinated electronics, but every chance of not waking up on command or hanging while it figures out where the internet (and its mommy) is so it can phone for updates before doing anything life-saving.
Proper testing. Static linking. Germanium transistors. A proper Westrex console. Them was the days.
Fought two wars, rationing etc, Suez etc, thin end of the wedge etc, more etc.
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