* Posts by J.G.Harston

3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

J.G.Harston Silver badge

"people aren't taught how to evaluate information presented to them"

Did they never go to school? That's a standard part of being able to do any form of school learning.

At least it was when I was at school in the '70s and '80s. How do you manage to get through the school curriculum if you aren't able to evaluation information presented to you? How can you learn *anything* if you aren't able to evaluate information?

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.

Blatant misrepresentation, they should be in nick.

A license is legal or contractual permission to use a resource, without which you are acting illegally or in breach of contract.

It is *NOT* illegal to use a computer without a license.

The ECDL is a certificate of computer use ability, ****NOT***** a license. How they are allowed to claim or call it is a license is astounding, there should be all manner of laws they are breaking. Here, I'll write "TAXI" on this bit of paper and call it a taxi license.

My bad! So you're saying that redacting an on-screen PDF with Tipp-Ex won't work?

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: The Windows way

Definitely lazy programmers. I've been ranting about this for almost four decades. Things like code that does: "find machine type, declare that this machine has no clock" instead of "look for a clock, if there is no clock then there is no clock".

In fact, not even lazy programmers, it's worse than lazy, it's... well I don't know what to call it, people with a hole in a certain part of their brain... programmers. Being "lazy" would be assigning them more mental activity than they actually did.

Alphabet Workers Union hits Google data center contractor with labor complaint: We were banned from discussing wages, say staff

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Sigh!

If. You. Don't. Want. To. Work. For. Google. Don't. Work. For. Google.

Ever wanted to own a piece of the internet? Now you can: $1 for a whole gTLD... or $2.8m if you want a decent one

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Optional

I take it you also refuse to use subdirectories and dump everything on your desktop.

The whole point of a hierarchical naming structure is that very hierarchical-ness of it.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Dodgy house wiring

I've had similar with stairs lights controlled by a switch at the top and at the bottom. The installers had clearly thought: there's an upstairs light and a downstairs light, so clearly it has to be wired into the upstairs fuse and the downstairs fuse. It was pure good luck I was standing on a ladder and gravity broke the connection when I discovered this.

Tab minimalists look away: Vivaldi introduces two-level tab stacks

J.G.Harston Silver badge

With displays getting wiiiiider it makes no sense at all for window furniture to be taking up more and more uppy-downny screen estate. Peering at the world through a letterbox is for shut-ins.

Man arrested after UK school finds wiped hard drives on devices connected to network

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Re: But Why?

"I'm curious to understand his motivation here."

Because he can. When I was at school decades ago, there was one chap who made it his mission to destroy the computer facilities.

No, I can't understand it either. My opinion was: why on earth would I do something to destroy my access to the very things I was going to every effort to have access to? "I love experimenting with computers, I know, I'll go to every effort to have my access to experimenting with computers stripped away from me."

Showering malware-laced laptops on UK schools is the wrong way to teach them about cybersecurity

J.G.Harston Silver badge

"Who was responsible for generating the image for the laptops and checking that it was correctly and securely installed?"

Why one earth were education departments using the devices with the manufacturer's image on them in the first place? Every device we deploy we image ourselves before we let them anywhere near the users.

You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously

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Re: Dirtiest PC

A new issue nowadays: I had a site call to a GP's where the keyboard smart card reader wasn't working. Before just swapping the keyboard I thought I'd pop the lid and just check inside. The innards were almost floating in clinical sanitiser from Covid wipe-downs. I gave up and just replaced the keyboard.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Foot pedal

Foot pedals are still used. Lexacom. Dragon Dictation. Some of my worst site calls are crawling around under desk for foul encrusted cable entangled foot pedal noisiomness.

Nothing new since the microwave: Let's get those home tech inventors cooking

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Incremental improvements occur all the time

Another +1. When I came to the UK from Hong Kong, my rice cooker was one of my precious belongings that I brought with me, as well as my slow cooker. Dump loads of veg+gristle in before work, come home to a delicious stoo. Fill the rice cooker and set the timer, and DING! evening meal as you walk through the door.

You would expect a qualified electrician to wire a building to spec, right? Trust... but verify

J.G.Harston Silver badge

In my flat a decade ago the suppliers put a new supply in, and neglected to put the earth link in from the supply head to the three flats' consumer points.

Laptops given to British schools came preloaded with remote-access worm

J.G.Harston Silver badge

"When we unboxed and prepared the laptops...."

So, "preparing" isn't "imaging with our standard build" then? Why on earth not?

Police drone plunged 70ft into pond after operator mashed pop-up that was actually the emergency cut-out button

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Six feet of 2.5 mill cable and three metres of 2-by-four timber. :)

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Fail safe?

In particular, windows that pop up or scroll onto the screen, just into place where your finger is milliseconds away from pressing the button you *had* targetted, so "open fire" is hit instead.

I almost shut down our sever the other day as something popped up over the start button as I was preparing to press 'log out' and 'shut down' scrolled under the pointer. Luckily it then said: This is odd, are you really sure you want to SHUT DOWN THE SERVER!?! Doubly lucky I was aware enough to avoid justbloodyclickdoitclickclickargghh!!!

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

J.G.Harston Silver badge

You see, this is why we don't have any caped superheros in this universe. They can't get the indemnity insurance against knocking out other airspace users.

Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: B, H

And u if your typewriter/typeface didn't have μ. 100uR resistor anybody? :)

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: SI

yebbut, H isn't a prefix, which is what the OP was talking about.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: B, H

3cm air gap: ;0

J.G.Harston Silver badge

`man units` tells me that the only remaining prefixes that aren't the same character as a unit are D I O Q U X - upper case are prefered for positive powers, and a prefix ending in -a (lower case and -o for negative powers). I think I and O would be ruled out for looking like l and 0, and X might be prefered to be reserved for 'unknown'.

So, Dottametres, Quinkametres, Umametres.

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: I went big

I had an electric typewriter that did that - press RETURN and it leaped the opposite direction off the table.

Union warns Openreach that engineers are ready to vote for industrial action over new grading structure

J.G.Harston Silver badge

I've worked with engineers, technicians and fitters, and these people aint engineers.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

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Re: AWS now liable?

People used to run BBSes on a computer in the corner of the bedroom. Then everything migrated to the Web, sitting on other people's computers in other people's offices. I can see a migration back to the computer in the corner of the bedroom, especially as hardware is so cheap and the supporting software infrastructure is so easy.

Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero

J.G.Harston Silver badge

You hear that Zoom developers? When running on Windows use the damn Windows furniture dammit. Give me a bloody title bar, put the bloody close button in the correct place, dammit *HAVE* a close button, put window minimise and maximise buttons in the correct place with the correct interface functionality, respond to damn context menus, *DONT HIDE THINGS*. Let *ME* control *MY* computer, dammit.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: And also started deviating from it

Good Glod, this. Screens have got wider and wider, so what do they do? Stuff more and more stuff uppy-downy. Some systems I end up with a content window close to one inch high and three feet across.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Keep your damn "OK" and "Cancel" buttons way apart!

*HAVE* Ok and Cancel buttons.

Zoom rant again. I went into settings, selected something, then spent several minutes looking for the OK button to instruct it that that was what I wanted. There isn't one. So, a) how do I confirm that's what I want and b) how do I cancel what I've fiddled with.

The standard "can't find a button, chuck this away" would be to click the CLOSE button. But that sets the settings as you've selected. LISTEN! THE CLOSE BUTTON IS NOT THE ****ING OK BUTTON!!!! DO I NEED TO GET THE BASEBALL BAT????

Two wrongs don't make a right: They make a successful project sign-off

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Re: Can't be that bad? Really?

I'm in my 50s and I *still* get asked for my GCSEs.

I tell 'em I haven't got any, but I've got a dozen 'O' levels that I might be able to remember.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: And b r e a t h e

Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do...

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

J.G.Harston Silver badge

That's all ok if you can *find* a list of reserved words.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Doubtless with the assistance of a baseball bat peppered with rusty nails.

Even a firearm that you have witnessed being unloaded is loaded until you yourself have it in your possession and have ensured it is unloaded.

And even then....

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Proof reader

When I'm proofreading I force myself to examine and read each word in isolation to bypass the pattern-matching. I'm doing some now for a neighbour (native Chinese writer, so in addition I'm trying to wrestle it into structural English*) and she can't understand why my proofing is taking so long "I can read that page in half a minute, why's it taken you an hour?"

*Eg:

You've changed deluded into delusive, I want it to say deluded.

But deluded is wrong, it's delusive.

Deluded is in the dictionary!

Yes, but. it's. still. wrong.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Proof reader

~~ed and ~~es catches me. 's' and 'd' are next to each other, and I type them without realising and my brain edits my vision so I see what I thought I types... sorry typed.

Sometimes I even type the complete wrong pudding and even though my brain sent "word" to my fingers and the tactile feedback reported that "word" was typed, and my vision confirms that "word" was typed, I come back a few puddings later and it's completely pudding.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Proof reader

I've lately been doing of <-> for of some reason.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

#

is not a hashtag.

It's a hash.

A hashtag is a hash followed by a tag.

thereby the name: Hash. Tag.

If # was a hashtag then #hello would be a hashtagtag

Amazon turns Victorian industrialist with $2bn building project to house workers near new headquarters

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Call me cynical, but of course this reduces Amazon's pre-tax profits, and consequently reduces the taxes on those profits.

Women are 40% of Indian STEM grads and in just 14% of tech jobs. Not good enough, says VP Naidu

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Exactly. The important numbers are the gender share of this year's STEM graduates with this year's gender share of STEM job applications and this year's gender share of STEM job placements.

Eg, for 30 years the NHS has had about 50/50 male/female recruitment, but it's only in the last few years that the workforce as a whole has got close to 50/50, because it takes 40+ years for the 90%/10% proportion who entered the profession 40 years ago to die off or retire.

Techies start growing an Alphabet-wide labor union: 200-plus sign up, only tens of thousands more to go

J.G.Harston Silver badge

You can already control what you work on. Don't like working on a military contract? Don't work on a military contract.

I don't like working for tobacco companies. I accomplish that by not working for tobacco companies.

The curse of knowing a bit about IT: 'Could you just...?' and 'No I haven't changed anything'

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Re: Sorting other people's stuff

They are, and we're constantly fighting Purchasing to get Financing to release sufficient funds to buy replacement kit, and in the meantime as a stopgap we're swapping them out for laptops with hairy masses of port extenders and hoping they don't melt a hole in people's desks

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Sorting other people's stuff

About five years or so ago my graphics card borked, so I took the PC to a shop to get a replacement card. The fitter expressed amazement that it booted to working in less than five seconds. Fairly ordinary no-name PC with WinXP, but regularly "cleaned" and de-crufted.

Today, at work, I'm often waiting half an hour to even get to the logon screen with Win10 on the PCs I maintain, and then another five minutes to log on.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Digging up memories of 'O' level chemistry, isn't one of the issues also that the usefulness of an electric cell is related to how "far apart" the electrodes and electrolytes are chemically. With Lithium you're bumping up against the end of the periodic table, I think the next "best" combination is Ceasium-Fluorine.

I built a shed once. How hard can a data centre be?

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Re: Sounds like my house

With the right equipment you can bodge 3-phase supply from single phase. Was one of our projects in C&G ElecEng.

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: Wot abaht GDPR then?

Nah, you have to do ROT13 twice for added protection.

J.G.Harston Silver badge

Re: 20 year old tech...

"You didn't ask about divergence and the big fucking tariffs the EU would wallop the UK with if it does diverge"

The EU is only able to wallop EU consumers with tarrifs. Whatever their delusions they can't control how foreigners (to them) wallop their own citizens. What they gonna do, send the gunboats in? Telling furriners how to run their own countries went oh so well in the 19th century didn''t it?

J.G.Harston Silver badge

"(b) nobody gets round to updating the documentation."

That's why I work so hard to get our Parish Council documents to specify outcomes not methods. And that's sometimes a hard task.

Me: Recommend a total number for the borough such that our town is allocated an whole number.

Q: What would that be?

Me: Something between 45 and 49.

Q: So we're going to pick a number between 45 and 49?

Me: No! We're recommending that *they* pick a number which would give our town a neat whole number, which would be between 45 and 49 for the whole borough.

Q: So, we're recommending between 45 and 49?

Me: No! We're recommending that *THEY* pick a number that gives *US* a *WHOLE* number, *NOT* what that number should be.

Q: So what number are we recommending?

ARRRRFGFGGHH!!!!

My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me

J.G.Harston Silver badge

I've got an old website I set up for some local election candidates 18 years ago. Can't get rid of it, as it's only accessible by dial up, and etc. etc.....

Buggy chkdsk in Windows update that caused boot failures and damaged file systems has been fixed

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Re: Yes the wonders of continual updates......

My virus checker detects me modifying a ZIP file and kills the running application - AND DELETES THE ZIP FILE!!!!. I have to turn it off for a couple of minutes while doing it. It's lately spotting another application creating RTF files and kills that as well. Grrr.

North of England NHS buyers name IT consultants who got in on £200m framework deal

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Re: Wouldn't it be cheaper....

How many companies do you know that build their own PCs?

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

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Re: Computer Literacy

My most precious gift in my 1970s pre-teens was a journalist typewriter I got for my 8th birthday. I was touch-typing within months.

'Following the science' rhetoric led to delay to UK COVID-19 lockdown, face mask rules

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Re: The Institute for Government, a bunch of non-scientists

Yes, not considering the science in the round leads to Sydney De'Ath seeing that life causes suffering, therefore to eliminate suffering you must eliminate life.