* Posts by Dan 55

15336 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Literally a legend

The story goes Tramiel came up with the Commodore 16/116/Plus 4 series to compete with the Spectrum but sales were pretty bad.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Cheers Sir Clive

First redefining what the public expect computers to be (somewhat more cut back and pared down than the competition) and somehow miraculously delivering computers at a bargain price that nobody else could manage (they still insisted on proper keyboards and floppy drives).

But even so Spectrums had all the software and were enough to start me and many others off in IT and that's what counts.

And if he didn't sink all his profits into electric vehicles and portable TVs I'm sure he would have had an empire.

Technology does widen the education divide. But not always in the way you expect

Dan 55 Silver badge

I also really hope the prevailing attitude of "Billy needs a tablet because everyone else has one, and because of all the apps he needs, and also it's just so good and educational while he doesn't have anything else to do" changes by the time my little ones get to school age.

I doubt it, schools are the first ones to be pushing Chromebooks. A new magical source of money from the special shop recommended by the school to go along with books and uniforms.

Technology doesn’t widen the education divide. People do that

Dan 55 Silver badge

Do you expect them to do this remotely at home?

Royal Navy will be getting autonomous machines – for donkey work humans can't be bothered with

Dan 55 Silver badge
Terminator

"No robot killers 'in my lifetime' says admiral"

Unfortunately the admiral's name went down in history as the first casualty in the rise of the machines of 2024.

WTF? Microsoft makes fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: "fixing deadly OMIGOD flaws on Azure your job"

Azure is hardly cheap though. It's as if you buy a ticket from BA and get Ryanair levels of service (which sounds about right too).

UK Cabinet Office calls off its search for a 'partner' in Whitehall SaaS ERP migration

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

This is not the outcome you were hoping for

Government IT all over, really.

You can 'go your own way' over GDPR, says UK's new Information Commissioner

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Hubert Cumberdale

In the infinitesimal chance that you're not being deliberately obtuse, the source is Liz Truss at the Policy Exchange and the Politico journalist was present at the speech and this is reflected in the journalists own Twitter feed. You may find a report on the Politico Europe website.

So, the UK has to follow EU standards for UK businesses to export to its neighbours but there is a policy of accepting lower standard goods from RoW into its home market undermining the UK standards that UK businesses have to follow. Brexit makes very little sense to me.

As this debate seems done and dusted we'll stop here. I'm sure you'd love to carry on but there's no point, the facts speak for themselves.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Hubert Cumberdale

That is not correct. Its not just the EU approach, thats the norm for all trade. Only importing what is acceptable by the importers standards.

You don't appear up to date with the British government's latest pronouncements on the matter. Liz Truss is on record to a Politico Europe trade journalist yesterday as saying that the UK will accept anything when imported but only UK businesses will have to follow UK standards.

So the UK will become very schizophrenic indeed:

- Home market - UK businesses must meet UK standards.

- Exports - UK businesses must meet destination country standards.

- Imports - shops will accept any old tat and put UK businesses at a disadvantage.

So because the UK will be accepting anything from abroad, UKCA will just turn into an albatross around British businesses' neck instead of a guarantor of minimum national standards.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Hubert Cumberdale

An effect who's existence is disputed.

By people who failed GCSE Geography.

For a country to domestically follow the laws of all trade partners it would.

If the UK allows food produced according to another country's standards to be imported, it's permitting those standards. This is unlike the EU's approach which is only to allow food produced to single market standards to be imported.

What is wrong with it?

British, Australian food standard differences causing angst in free trade deal

We can dream.

They walk among us.

I see your complaining I just dont see at what.

None so blind as those who don't want to see.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Double trouble

UKCA's had the can kicked down the road a year and I bet it won't be the last time.

Eventually when it's finally running UKCA will just be a cut-price rubber-stamp of already-existing CE standards because it's impossible to argue against trade gravity. Source: GCSE Geography three and a bit (mumble) decades ago.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: @Hubert Cumberdale

Also a country would be schizophrenic to adopt all the regulations in the world domestically.

It would. But then, before the UK had a vote at the table where EU regulations are set, which are in force in the single market and also carry weight in a lot of the world (Brussels effect, similar to the California effect) so it wouldn't need to be schizophrenic.

Now it's just going to have to import any old shitty Australian beef. And drop climate objectives in trade agreements. Because rattling our tin for trade agreements is the new post-Brexit Great British way.

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

New proposals will repeal “onerous” rules and allow hospitality venues to voluntarily place the crown on pint glasses.

Strange of the article to omit that pint glasses are mostly made in France anyway. I guess the French supplier will add the crown, if the venue pays more for a distinctive design on the pint glass that nobody else has.

This will be part of a bigger package of changes designed to slash EU-era red tape to “improve competition, remove barriers to innovation and help both consumers and businesses”.

Yeah. Only the pint glasses are made in an EU country anyway...

Linux kernel minimum compiler raised to GCC 5.1, allowing potential C11 use

Dan 55 Silver badge

If you can only put variables at the start of a block and then you delete some code in a function, you're in danger of leaving some variables at the top which could be deleted.

I suppose they'll be optimised away in the object code, but the source code should be clean and understandable.

Future of Jekyll project (engine behind GitHub Pages) in doubt?

Dan 55 Silver badge

It seems to be a rather sad state of affairs when working software which hasn't received an update in nine months is considered in danger of becoming obsolete. There's a lot to be said for simple programs which are more-or-less 'done' and aren't constantly changing or pulling the rug out from under your feet with every update.

Technology has the potential to close the education divide. Key word: Potential

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Quieter kids can speak up in chat,

I imagine speaking up in chat works just as well for kids in education as it does in the Teams/Zoom meetings that we all have to suffer daily.

Running on empty, out of battery, power draining... three things the UK government definitely isn't. Oh no

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Running on empty?

There's a whole lot of kite flying between now and next May.

Facebook building 'on-demand executable file format' that self-inflates using homebrew compression

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Start your engines virus folks...

It's probably more about slowing down Google Play app scanning, knowing Zuckerborg.

Apple emergency patches fix zero-click iMessage bug used to inject NSO spyware

Dan 55 Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Autocratic governments, that's a broad brush nowadays.

The UK left the EU of its own accord on a 52%/48% (of those that voted) advisory referendum.

The UK government said a few weeks ago that there would need to be sustained support in polls of over 60% over "a reasonably long period" for Scotland to have a referendum.

So which is more controlling again? The UK isn't a union of equals (as it wasn't in 1707).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Autocratic governments, that's a broad brush nowadays.

Have the downvoters forgotten about the #BorisBotArmy already?

Tech widens the educational divide. And I should know – I'm a teacher in a pandemic

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Tech probably does widen the educational divide

Shouldn't that be just Sweden? Denmark sent children home in 2020 like many places because nobody knew what they were dealing with, then started opening up in 2021.

Sweden meanwhile did a split 50/50 home/school teaching in 2020 but didn't keep any useful data about what happened.

Not too bright, are you? Your laptop, I mean... Not you

Dan 55 Silver badge

MacBooks

It was also not producing video. Worse than that, the screen was simply blank. The lights came on, the disk could be heard spinning, but of the display, nothing. Even turning it off and on again could not coax the visuals into life.

Macbooks start up with a completely black screen backlight from time to time. If you've set it up with a boot password, it waits for you to select your user with the mouse and input your password but as the backlight brightness media keys don't work on the boot screen it's pretty difficult to do.

The solution, shine a mobile phone torch through the Apple logo on the back of a lid so you can see the screen.

Must have been more than a decade with that problem yet they still haven't put (if brightness < MINIMUM_BRIGHTNESS) brightness = MINIMUM_BRIGHTNESS in the EFI.

Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Happy

Re: To be honest if you define literacy like that, the bar is set pretty low.

Speaking of literacy, it was not my assertion (I'm not the original poster), but it was my observation.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: History repeats itself

IKEA (and Lego) are pretty good at pictorial instructions to be honest. It's the instructions from those who are trying to be like IKEA and Lego that you need to watch out for.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: History repeats itself

Quoted:

Adult literacy rate is the percentage of people ages 15 and above who can both read and write with understanding a short simple statement about their everyday life

To be honest if you define literacy like that, the bar is set pretty low.

Fujitsu wins £5m contract to support the UK's troubled Border Crossing system

Dan 55 Silver badge

Patch now? Why enterprise exploits are still partying like it's 1999

Dan 55 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Big problem...

Unfortunately thanks to Sillicon Valley's ADHD you can't be sure that an update to your VM software or W10 won't screw up your VM or W10.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Big problem...

Is legacy hardware.

We have a shield printer (metal and plastic), the control software only runs on DOS and the thing is attached over a serial cable. We found a "spare" on eBay for a couple of thousand Euros. A new one is around 6 figures. We collect old PCs and keep them in storage, in case the old one fails.

How about a NuXT - modern hardware functionally the same as mid-80s hardware?

Maybe you could also try FreeDOS, which should work on more modern hardware and if you're lucky you can get USB-Serial working on it.

A developer built an AI chatbot using GPT-3 that helped a man speak again to his late fiancée. OpenAI shut it down

Dan 55 Silver badge

Black Mirror - Be Right Back

I guess if it's on YouTube then it's fair game for linking to...

UK.gov is launching an anti-Facebook encryption push. Don't think of the children: Think of the nuances and edge cases instead

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Cesspit of criminals, despots & the downright untrustworthy

That would be a variety of members of parliament & their advisors, lackies & hangers on.

Sorry, that cannot be proven, due to a freak IT problem, the phone wiped itself and was replaced and the Google Drive backup disappeared.

Snyk: 50% of security jobs unfilled… any solution predicated on devs 'becoming security experts is doomed'

Dan 55 Silver badge

If your aim is to get bought out by FAAMG and you get VC funding until you get bought out, why bother charging for anything?

GitHub merges 'useless garbage' says Linus Torvalds as new NTFS support added to Linux kernel 5.15

Dan 55 Silver badge

I know it's distributed, but even when it's not really (i.e. I know only I'm using the branch and I'm up to date), and I want to do something like delete a few files, rename a few others, and add new files in the same revision, it does things like deciding some deleted files have been renamed to a new file because their content is similar. Apparently the most reliable way is committing the deleted files in one revision, then committing the renamed files in another revision, then committing new files in a third revision. So much for Linus' nice clean commit history.

Even reverting one single file becomes an odyssey in itself which could take other files with it.

If really have to read git's source code to understand how it works then that's a failure. It should have a handful of understandable commands with predictable outcomes.

And as for git's supposed raison d'etre, didn't Linus just say GitHub merges were useless garbage anyway? What task does GitHub call to perform the merge?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Devil

If it's an important project and needs to be done properly, use subversion (and it's not as if I like that very much either). If it isn't, go ahead and let git play the shell game with your changes.

To this day I have no idea why git is supposedly so fantastic if it gets absolutely everything round its neck when committing and reverting. After messing about with it too much, I finally categorised it under "pointless stuff I have no time for".

British data watchdog brings cookies to G7 meeting – pop-up consent requests, not the delicious baked treats

Dan 55 Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Tame data commissioner enacts performative cookie banner removal request to wow domestic audience

... while Whitehall gets on with chipping away at the real data protection (UK-GDPR).

It would be more convenient for the UK ruling junta if the banners go before UK-GDPR does, because otherwise people might think something is amiss if the UK-GDPR underpinnings disappear and banners for sites hosted in the UK change to "All your data are belong to us and anyone we sell it to [ACCEPT]".

Facebook apologises after its AI system branded Black people as primates

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: No "I" in this AI

ML programmed by brogrammers is biased. No QA to speak of. Just another day at Facebook.

Report details how Airbus pilots saved the day when all three flight computers failed on landing

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Automation Issue

There are those who argue France wouldn't let Airbus be blamed.

Why we abandoned open source: LiveCode CEO on retreat despite successful kickstarter

Dan 55 Silver badge
Joke

Re: choices that have been around since before Pascal

Ah, so you didn't teach her Perl then.

VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

2010: Xserve killed. MacMini suggested as replacements.

2014: New MacMini unsuitable for server use (fewer cores, no user replaceable parts inside).

2018: Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server.

2021: VMware realises Apple couldn't give a toss about Macs as servers.

Norwegian student tracks Bluetooth headset wearers by wardriving around Oslo on a bicycle

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

tl;dr

Guy on a wobbly bike stalking joggers from 50 metres behind by their Bluetooth MAC addresses publishes shock claims saying they can be stalked.

Another guy on a wobbly bike stalking joggers from 50 metres behind can do the same thing but without any wardriving kit.

Logitech Bolt devices support secure Bluetooth Low Energy – but forget the 'Unifying Receiver'

Dan 55 Silver badge

At that point I think all optical mice had to be on a shiny metal pad with a grid on it due to the kind of sensor used.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Standards

I think Logitech's entire business model must revolve around inventing a new fantastic receiver for the latest generation of products which is incompatible with all previous generations.

A speech recognition app goes into a bar. Speak up if you’ve heard it already

Dan 55 Silver badge

There was a siren network in the UK until 1992 (end of cold war), then most got decommissioned as maintaining them costs money. Some were kept in flood areas, however it seems residents don't find out they don't work until it's too late as maintaining them costs money.

AWS Tokyo outage takes down banks, share traders, and telcos

Dan 55 Silver badge

Don't forget governments moving to cloud either.

Power users of Microsoft OneDrive suffer massive inconvenience: Read-only files

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Apparently Microsoft software has gotten so complex that

That happened at about Windows XP.

Children of China, your state-sanctioned hour of gaming begins … now!

Dan 55 Silver badge

The battle is already lost. It's absolutely impossible to place restrictions on your kids regarding the Internet unless you're hovering over their shoulder 24 hours a day. If you somehow manage to find half-decent parental controls that work with all the computers, tablets, smart TV, etc... in the home and on their mobile, they'll just play on a friend's device or their school will make you buy a Chromebook which is admin'd by themselves so you can't change a thing yet has the world's most ineffectual content blocker.

And that's before we get onto the bullying and other more unsavoury aspects of social media/IM/online gaming. It's not the 80s any more when parental controls meant taking the portable TV out of the kid's bedroom, if they were lucky enough to have one in the first place. So, yeah, some joined-up thinking at government level would be nice. Perhaps some happy medium in between you on your own trying to hold back the whole of the Internet and what China's done.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Text and point & click adventures are pretty niche nowadays, I'm not sure if you'd have been able to learn all the English you need from online first-person face-shooting simulators.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Lucky Chinese kids

Imagine all the fun they can have typing in listings from magazines and finding out where the errors are. For bonus points it can save badly or crash when the RAM pack wobbles. Western kids nowadays just aren't interested in that for some reason.

Windows 10 to hang on for five more years with 21H2 update

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 404 error - windows edition not found

Unsurprisingly, it seems a redirect page too complicated for the corporation that brought you Azure.

When you finish celebrating Linux turning 30, try new Linux 5.14, says Linus Torvalds

Dan 55 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Pop the cork on the next 30

As this is IT, would anyone like Perl as a gift instead?