* Posts by J.G.Harston

3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

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Re: Charge the chargers

"When the EU is going to do anything about the Chinese chargers being sold that don't meet any safety and electromagnetic emission norms?"

That's a job for trading standards, same as ever.

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"Apple also said it would harm innovation"

Bollocks. Moving to a UK-wide single electricity standard in the 1920s/1930s *BOOSTED* innovation as manufacturers weren't wasting resources making dozens of different versions of equipment. Moving to world-wide common "kettle lead" appliance connectors in the 1970s boosted innovation for the same reason. Probably a huge part of modern productivity and living standards arises from standard interchangable common parts.

China 'must seize TSMC' if the US were to impose sanctions

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"TSMC, a company that originally belonged to China"

That's a new one.

Frist!

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

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Re: Easy to miss something trivial

Come to Sheffield. Get off the bus at Coles Corner, where Cole's used to be, then go down past where C&A used to be, past where the Hole In The Road used to be, you need to turn right where Marples used to be, opposite where the Yorkshire Bank used to be, pass where the Post Office used to be, we'll meet where Sheaf Baths used to be....

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Re: Easy to miss something trivial

I've been navigating where my instruction "take the next left" has resulted in the driver turning into somebody's driveway.

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Re: Easy to miss something trivial

I've seen people, when given these sort of instructions, hover over the keyboard with a finger over CTRL and a finger over C and carefully send both fingers simultaneously towards the keyboard. I've even seen them do it with SHIFT. How on earth do they have no cencept of the way SHIFT/CTRL works as a modifier, that you would press SHIFT *then* WHILE SHIFT IS BEING PRESSED go hunting for the other key and press it.

HTF do they manage to type !"£$%^&*() ???

HTF have the actions that result when pressing various things on a keyboard not managed to filter in through their senses into their brain? This is at the level of never managing to notice what happens when you relax your bladder muscles.

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Re: Two types of workers

The procedure checklist thingies* I write for building new devices almost always start with "remove from box". Although it sounds daft, it forces you to check you've got the right damn bit of equipment!

*I don't like calling them scripts, because to me that's a textual list of commands the the computer executes.

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Re: Everybody knows...

No, the options must always be *VERBS*. /ALL/ the options.

Do you want to cancel?

((CANCEL)) ((RESUME))

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

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Re: Not slacking

There's a difference between /running/ a business from home and /operating/ a business from home. Broad brush, if you're a car mechanic and do your admin from home, it's not business premises, but if you strip down and fix the cars at home, it is.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

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Pah! File server on .254, printer server on .235. :)

UK opens up 'high-potential individual route' for tech worker immigration

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Re: Hmm

"So wages rise when there is a shortage of labour. But that then blows away the lies that having a massive reserve labour force of the entire EU didn't keep down wages at the lower end."

You've just destroyed your own argument in your second sentence with your first sentence. If wages are going up now, that can't mean anything other than wages were *not* going up then. And having a massive reserve labour force *does* keep wages down, as the entire history of self-organising employee groups have known throughout the history of guilds, unions, plaques, etc., where the aim - from the workers' side - is to restrict the supply of labour as much as possible to squeeze as much as possible out of the bastered employers.

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Pint

Re: How about..

Have one ->

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Re: Not nearly enough....

It's bizzare that the *Conservative* Party are applying standard Marxian economics: restrict the size of the labour pool, which forces the bastard capitalists to compete for workers by increasing workers' pay/benefits/etc. Vote Tory Get Socialism. Can I wake up yet?

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Re: High Tech, High Wage Economy ?

"we just don't have enough of our own people of the required real standard to fill the vacancies."

No, our employers just point blank refuse to pay for the talent. It's there if they're prepared to pay for it, but all too many aren't.

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"Brexit has closed the door to the world's top graduates. Hiring from abroad now incredibly difficult."

But wasn't that the entire point? UK employers point blank refuse to use home-grown talent, and cop out by strip-mining foreign countries for it instead. Close off that door and force UK employers, screaming blue murder, to actually get off their arse and use UK workers.

Keeping your head as an entire database goes pear-shaped

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And get rid of the IF as well. Always report the actual system-generated error message, and then *afterwards*, *if* there is a need to do so, check for any specifics.

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"Well, we had run out of space so I deleted some files"

That is sometimes (well, often in my experience) caused by crappy application software. It does:

errorhandler: if err=cantsave print "The disk is full - delete something"

instead of

errorhandler: reporterror; if err=cantsave print "Couldn't save"

I had this where the underlying error was "user account run out of allocated space", *NOT* "disk full". The solution was to credit the user with more space, not to go trawling the disk desperately deleting things, and wondering why the damn thing STILL wouldn't work with a disk 99.99% empty.

Logitech's MX Mechanical keyboard, Master 3S mouse

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You'll rip my £10 Dell SK3205 from my cold dead hands.

Seriously - *hundred*-something quid for a keyboard, and one that doesn't even have proper full-travel half-inch deep keycaps? I was provided with a laptop at work, and immediately plugged a proper keyboard into it so I could - y'know - actually use it.

Ransomware attack sends US county back to 1977

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" it has a 14 percent false positive rate that "remains too high to adopt this approach as-is," the researchers wrote."

That's seven times better than the AV on my machine that complains every time I try to save over an existing RTF document.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

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Re: Next time

"One day, my pal set a small tray of isocyanate to melt over a bunsen burner in the fume cupboard, but before he could add it to the next chemical, he got called away on a phone call."

BZZZTT!!! There is no such thing as "getting called away" when you have an active chemical fume going.

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Idiots abound

I've had a person break into a filing cabinet containing the office master and backup disks and various admin stuff, and empty the contents onto the floor because "he needed another drawer".

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

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Re: Forbidden Fruit

I vaguely remember some long-forgotten reading that suggested the forbidden fruit was a pomegranate. It's certainly the devil's fruit, all them damn seeds.

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Re: That input problem

So that just means there's a market niche for after-market add-on proper keyboards, like the ickle keyboard I plug into my tablet. Admittedly, yes, it's not a great typing experience, but it's hugely betterer than having half my content covered by an on-screen keyboard, and not having the keys you actually want (WTH are the damn cursor keys? HTF do I shift-move-select some text? Where's the damn Escape key?) and not being able to see through my finger-tip to see where I'm actually typing, and not getting any tactile feedback to tell me I have actually pressed something.

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Re: Lousy web design

Yeah, it's the attitude "I put kitchen grease in my car, now my car doesn't run properly, bloody stupid car!"

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Re: mobile screens too small?

Argh! Don't get me started on bloody Teams.

I logged on as Admin to install Teams. Then logged on as me. And I couldn't run Teams. BECAUSE IT INSTALLS ITSELF IN THE USER AREA! WHAT THE BLOODY ****????

Get. In. The Damn. Program. Area. Where. You. Bloody. Belong. So. All. Users. Can. Run. You. Dammit.

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Whenever I see an advert saying "download our app to buy our burgers/check our bus timetable/get a weather forecast" I always respond "I've already got an app to do that - A WEB BROWSER!!!!! USE IT!!!!!!"

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

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Re: Just a quick question.

Seems to be a non-trivial task writing English as well. "non" is not a word.

Seriously, you do not want to make that cable your earth

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Re: Of earths

"I used to play with old TVs when I was 12, (live chassis) and I knew that mains leakage feeling a mile off!"

Thank god, it wasn't just me! I used to think I had some wierd superpower, nobody would ever believe me that I could "feel" mains power, and I just taught myself never to mention it to anybody. Thank goodness it's just plain old physics.

Now, dare I tell anybody I can "feel" increases in air pressure? I can tell you there'll be a thunder storm an hour before it happens.

September 16, 1992, was not a good day to be overly enthusiastic about your job

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I remember September 1992. It's when we got our mortgage. 15% interest rates anybody?

And kids today.....

Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back

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Re: ...whether YES should go on the left and NO on the right

The correct answer is: which way does your language write? The "ok"yness option should always be in the direction of time's arrow as represented by the writing system being used.

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

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Re: I love demands to do the impossible

Pointy-Haired Boss. See Dilbert.

Ransomware the final nail in coffin for small university

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Re: Question...

Shuttering is what you do when you're pouring concrete. Maybe that's what they're doing.

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

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"getting people used to being paid monthly like they have a job"

The last oodles of public sector IT jobs I've had were paid weekly. And the last two private sector ones as well.

An international incident or just some finger trouble at the console?

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Fog in the channel

Router down, France isolated....

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

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Re: College Tales...

While the picture I linked to was indeed an ethernet NIC for an Arc, this is an ethernet NIC for a BBC Master.

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In the Hong Kong job I mentioned earlier, when setting up the network we couldn't get continuity from one end to the other. We went through the whole building checking all the ports. As it was a new install the cabling had been put in floor trunking, then concreted over as part of the shopfitting, with breakout ports installed in the floor as final fix*. We checked all the ports, couldn't find any problems. Until it occured to me that two ports were in a diagonal, and the trunking followed a grid pattern.

Looking at the "missing" corner, we saw a large, heavy display table. Looking closer revealed one leg smashed straight through the floor port.

*Of course, none of the floor ports actually matched up with where the desks ended up. Cue loads of power and network extension leads taped across carpets and up legs.

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Re: College Tales...

Today's computer science is "how to type". It's office skills. Absolutely nothing to do with actual real computing stuff. And they charge you 30 grand to "teach" you it.

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Re: College Tales...

Acorn did indeed use coax ethernet. I installed such a network at Stirling University and when I was working in Hong Kong. picture.

Mozilla browser Firefox hits the big 100

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Re: Enjoy?

"A very thin scrollbar" is *explicitly* saying "there is no scrollbar, there is no more content than is currently visible in the window".

If you have to *active* *seek* to discover if there is additional content, the prsentation is biorked beyond comprehension.

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Recently Firefox has updated itself and borked everything. I've recently had to uninstall it and re-install it from scratch, and then re-install all my extensions. And then find out how to get it to display the bookmarks and previous drop-downs correctly spaced so that all the entries are still on screen instead of having to scroll all the way down to the carpet. And fix the toolbar - which still seems wrong, my muscle memory keeps taking me to the wrong place. And loads of other borkage that I'm too tired to try to remember, having spent a whole day getting everything working again.

A discounting disaster averted at the expense of one's own employment

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Ability results in punishment

Congratulations for doing some "doing" stuff successfully. We're now going to punish you by removing you from "doing" and making you do management.

I had a friend where this happened to him. He so successful as a programmer, his innate and enjoyed talent, they banned him from programming and forced him to be a manager, something he has no aptitude for or enjoyment of. Why do so many companies do this? Strip talented people away from using their talent and force them to do something they have no wish, aptitude, ability or satisfaction for?

ZX Spectrum: Q&A with some of the folks who worked on legendary PC

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Character-cell based attributes is also how ANSI works.

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Legendary PC? The Spectrum's not a PC.

Meta materials: Facebook using AI to design green concrete

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As Bob indirectly refers to, concerete is sort-of carbon neutral. You make cement by driving off the CO2. The cement sets by re-absorbing it. See BioDome Two, cement properties, knowledge, lack of, for more details.

Timetable for industrial action ballot against BT imminent

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If they want shares of BT's profit they are completely free to buy some shares in BT.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

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Re: Density

"Given that the DD media was manufactured as HD but failed to make the grade"

That's not how that works. HD media has a completelty different surface coating than DD media. The grains are a different size, the magnetic coercivity is different. DD disks are *NOT* "failed" HD disks. A failed HD disk is a failed HD disk. It's like saying a 24" bicycle tyre is a failed 48" tyre.

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Re: Such memories...

I needed 15 metres of 25mm power cable for a remote supply feed. I went to the local wholesalers, paid the horrifying amount of money required, and the server then proceeded to start FOLDING IT INTO ONE METRE LENGTHS!!!!!!!!!!!

I've never moved so fast as I reached over the counter to grab it from his hands. NO!!!!!!! I NEED 15 METRES OF POWER CABLE, NOT 15 ONE-METRE POWER CABLES!!!!!

An early crack at network management with an unfortunate logfile

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Pint

Re: Safely raising eyebrows

For another PDP11 programmer --->

Windows 11 usage stats within touching distance of... XP

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Is this a private Yorkshireman sketch, or can anybody join in?

The workhorse laptop I'm typing on I pulled out of a bin in 2013. Flattened the hard drive and installed Win7. It still runs perfectly fine. The hard drive is starting to get rather full, so I'm intending to splash out twenty quid on quadrupling the disk size.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

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Re: What about Assembly Language?

That's the bunny. The old forgettery playing up. Programming Language for Microcomputers.