* Posts by J.G.Harston

3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Gawd! *Every* bit of repeated routine processing I do I ensure is written down as an "aircraft cockpit" step list. *Including* the steps that don't involve the computer, such as: Obtain new user's prefered name, note as name/surname pair, ensure this is correct, *EVERYTHING* will be copy'n'pasted from this.

I tear my hair out at the horrifying number of cases where people *type* *in* the same data repeatedly, adding in their own unique errors every time. Get it in the computer *ONCE*, then use that. Do. Not. repeatedly process it through somebody's brain.

BOFH and the case of the disappearing teaspoons

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Re: Ho, hum...

Efficiently operationalize our strategies and invest in world-class technology to leverage our core competencies in order to holistically administrate exceptional synergy to set a brand trajectory and advance our market share with proven methodology and a strong commitment to quality.

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SPOON!

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

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Re: Photocopier challange

Why on earth were you trying to REVERSE out of a drive in the first place? You reverse *IN*to a drive, so that you *ADVANCE* *OUT* of it.

You reverse into a blind space that you control, you never reverse into a blind space that you don't control; you *advance* into a space you *don't* control specificallly so it is *not* a blind space - so you can /see/ what you're advancing into. What you have done is just got into the habit of blindly running over whoever is on the road outside.

Google Maps, search results to point women to actual abortion providers

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Re: for balance

And of course that was clearly representative as shown in the vote where 99.99% voted for Remain.

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Isn't this a non-story? Search engine developers work to ensure search engine gives appropriate results to searches. Film at ten.

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

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Re: America without V8's just isn't America

"all it says is that it;ll be illegal to sell new fossil fuel vehicles"

Yes, Cali will turn into Cuba where people keep decades-old combustion cars on the roads because it's impossible to replace them. Even if the state bans fuel sales, people will make their own, and they can straight-faced claim they're green because they're just cycling carbon from the air through plants and back into the air to go back into plants.

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

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Re: Wind and solar

Exactly the same as with river-cooled coal power stations. I remember back in 1976 there were concerns at Drax because there was insufficient draught in the Ouse to draw cooling water from.

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Re: Excellent news

It's behind you!

Smartphone gyroscopes threaten air-gapped systems, researcher finds

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Re: Accessing gyroscope from a browser @ds999

Read up on "The Thing" in the US embassy in Moscow. An elaborate wooden carving given to the ambassador as a gift from the Soviets which concealed a passive radiator that changed characteristics in line with the ambient sound, and modified a radio carrier transmitted from outside the premises. Once you have infiltrated the system by supplying its components, all you need to to sit passively outside and listen.

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

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All these immediately fail at the keyboard. Nothing is better than my Pi blu-tak'd to the back of a proper clacky full-size full-travel proper Dell SK3205.

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

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Re: A markdown editor

The editor in Devpac Gens for the Spectrum is very vi-like. At uni when first introduced to vi I couldn't "get" it until it suddenly clicked - oohhhh!!!! It's just VIEW, but instead of ESC to switch between editing and command mode, it's : and then i to go back to editing. Why. Didn't. You. Say?!?!?!?

J.G.Harston Silver badge

I find metapad supplies over 99% of my text editing needs in only 190K. The odd time I have a file with weird control code in it, I load it into StrongEd, fix it, and save it back out.

Is there a StrongEd for Windows?

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

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Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

I need 4 ten-foot lengths of 15mm pipe, along with six metres of 2-by-four timber. ;)

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Re: From Mssrs Pratchett & Gaimain

Volts Jolt, Current Kills.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

We would do it by converting everything to pennies, doing the calculation, then converting back to LSD.

10% interest on £1.1s.8d is 10% of 260d, so 26d, so 186d, so £1.3s.10d.

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Re: Decimal?

That would introudce a parroty error.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Bank Accounts

In Sheffield, until it was demolished for a bypass ten years after 7-digit numbers came along, there was a shop in town that still displayed its 40-year-old *five*-digit telephone number above the shop front. It had remained through two sets of number extensions, I wouldn't have been surprised if the last time the signage was updated was when the numbers went up from four digits. ;)

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Bank Accounts

Human inertia is HUUUUGE. *THIRTY* years after reforming the telephone number system people *still* get phone numbers wrong. You wonder how they remember to breathe.

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

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Re: Hmmmm

That would be an ecumenical matter.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Welcome to England 1974. "Three Rivers"? WTH is that? "Rother"? Oh, that must be near Rotherham. Nope, Sussex.

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And also, as the rest of the world gets richer, they want their own health service.

As repeatedly stated many times by many different government bods, the NHS has imported foreign staff for decades, so "why should we change?" Yeah, we've always built on foundations of sand, why do anything different.

It worked in the past as we could strip-mine other countries of healthcare staff as those other countries couldn't afford to use them. But no, brown people in hot countries quite like the idea of having a health service, and they are getting rich enough to actually afford it. So, yes it is getting more difficult to predicate our health service on ever-increasing imports of staff when we are now competing with ever larger numbers of other countries who also want to do the same, along with the source countries who have the audacity to think that they'd quite like to keep their home-grown health staff themselves thank you very much.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Bankrupt the country so you can sell it to Rishi's father in law

Exactly the same as 180 or so other countries in the world.

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" the European Processor Initiative, which is working on a homegrown RISC-based chip project."

Ey up, we've already got a home-grown RISC-based chip project, grown from sturdy Cambridgeshire acorns.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

"-> the island nation

Which island would that be? The Isle of White or the Isle of Man?"

Adjectives are always singular. "island nation" - a nation made up of island(s).

a forest nation

a mountain nation

a canal city

a skyscraper city

some nine-YEAR-old children

some twenty-POUND potatoes

some ten-POLE tudors

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We agreed to leave the EU, that means leaving the EU. Where's the disagreement?

The CHIPS Act won't end US reliance on foreign foundries

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MADE IN USA?

That's that small town in north-eastern Kyushu isn't it?

Ryugu asteroid: It came from the outer solar system, say scientists

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It came from Outer Space

And this is how the message ran.....

Google teaches robots to serve humans – with large language models the key

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Re: "Google teaches robots to serve humans..."

Originally a Damon Knight short story that became a Twilight Zone episode.

Edit: Mike137, you got there before me. :)

Excel @ mentions approach general availability on the desktop

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Gerrof my lawn!

None of this make sense.

NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers

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There are pre-existing space-hardened 6502s and 6809s that can run at 50MHz and more. They don't need to re-invent the wheel - unless they have a technical legacy of PIC code that they need to keep running, but FASTER!

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

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Re: Shoddy reporting

And surely the NHS still has the data. It's been copied, not moved. It's not Star Trek where copying data destroys the source.

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Re: @Dwarf

"I have a condition that requires regular platelet counts. As I understand it, this particular test is still largely counted by eye under a microscope by the path. lab at my local hospital, something that really ought to be able to be automated, which would speed up the process."

That's odd, I worked on a computer platelet counting thingy back in the 1980s.

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

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But we're not talking about the content, we're talking about searching for the content.

There's a teacher in Bath who was falsely accused of murder a couple of decades ago. Should it be impossible to finds reports about that without already knowing where the reports are? Should a search for "bombing in Guildford" not report any matches for bombings in Guildford? The whole point of any search system is that you are searching for things.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

If the original judgement held, that would mean all libraries would have to go through their stock ripping pages out of newspapers, go through all their bibliographies ripping pages out, people would be banned from answering the question: do you remember that article last year where X....? 1984 IS NOT AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL!

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

J.G.Harston Silver badge

You fail physics forever

If it lasts for thousands of years, by definiton it's not dangeroursly radioactive.

If it's dangerously radioactive, by definition it won't last for thousands of years.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: "Why is anyone worried about the plant at Zaporizhzhia being shelled"?

What idiot decided to build loads of dams in the Rhur valley when everybody knew it was right in the middle of what would be a war zone 50 years later?

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

Don't worry, I'm sure if you declare yourself a freeman of the land you'll be fully insulated from the effects of American imperialism.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

Ok, let's stick with coal = clean then.

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Re: "Of all the non-carbon energy options we have...

Near where I live there's hundred of centuries-old mineshafts gifted to use by our ancestors, and piles of iron ore slag, that are going to have to be maintained for centuries.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: "Of all the non-carbon energy options we have...

"So, it's not safe after 115,000 years. It's just half as deadly."

Physics fail. It's not half as deadly, there's half of it left.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: "Of all the non-carbon energy options we have...

If the half life is 115,000 years, then by definition it's not dangerous as because the only way it can last that long is by giving off very little radiation at any instant of time. How much water comes out of a bucket if it takes 115,000 years to empty half of it?

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Re: Bang On - except the death stats

The dumping of nuclear "waste" into the ocean at Fukushima actually made the ocean *cleaner* There was less radiation in the dumped water than was already in the ocean.

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Re: Waste

If it's low level, then who cares? Move to Aberdeen and eat a bananana it's more radiactive.

If it's high level, again, who cares, by the very definition of it being high level radiactive it's only radiactive for a very short time, so again, who cares, it'll be gone before you notice.

Twitter unveils US midterm election integrity plans, upsets almost everyone

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"You may not use Twitter's services for the purpose of manipulating or interfering in elections or other civic processes"

*ANY* communication with an elector is an attempt to manupulate an election. I put hundreds of leaflets through letterboxes in order to attempt to manipulate people's opinion of me in order to get them to vote for me. Am I to be banned from buying paper and printer toner, and walking up and down the streets? Am I to be banned from talking to electors?

Scientists unveil a physics-defying curved space robot

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Re: Weird setup

They've invented the badly-loaded washing machine!

J.G.Harston Silver badge

That looks just like how I move my wheeled chair across the floor, just swing my legs and varying speeds. In fact, that's how you impart motion to yourself on a swing. Have they just invented the swing?

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

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Re: adapter

Birmingham screwdriver.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

In the '00s we had an outside visitor who would just pop out an existing network lead from a wall socket and plug his laptop in.

# How do I get a connection?

$ Enter your user name and password in the connection dialog.

# What's my user name and password?

$ Well, your user name is your initials followed by your payroll number. *You* know *your* password.

# What's my payroll number?

$ It's on your payslip

# But I don't work here.

$ So why are you trying to access our network?

# Can I just log on as you?

$ Well, a) No, because I would then be fired, and b) No, because your laptop's network address won't be registered as one of our computers and won't be allowed access.

President Biden signs CHIPS and Science Act into law

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$2 billion covering legacy chips in vehicles and defense systems

Oooo, an opening for my PDP11 skillz?