Posts by Version 1.0

Re: “nudge them towards different content”

When I was six years old my mum talked to the library manager and got me a set of "Adult" tickets which made me so happy, I could head home with a couple of Biggles books (I have read so many of W. E. Johns books), and some books about research into early telepathy testing and human evolution. And then I started reading about how to start drawing ... lots of books with illustrations of the naked human posture that showed how to draw accurately.

So I believe that limiting children to little kiddy events and preventing them from seeing the adult environment has the potential to result in problems - as adults we think we're smart but actually (just look at current politics) we can be stupid too. It's best to teach kids that stupidity is normal but needs to be avoided.

Re: Security is hard!

These days everything is tested to show that it works and then it's seen as done and once it's done, the testing is seen as complete. It's uncommon for manufacturers to test things with the aim to show that they don't work - once you fail that test you can be a lot more comfortable then just being shown a note that says it looks like it's safe; "It was unhackable (because we didn't try to hack it)"

Re: Reinventing the wheel... for what purpose?

When I was a young guy I saw a great operating system written in PL/M (aka Programming Language for Microcomputers). The neat thing was that you could review it very easily to see how it worked.

Re: Trust me, I'm a ...

> "People will give up info if you just ask nicely,"

"You know the rules and so do I, a full commitment's what I'm thinking of, you wouldn't get this from any other app. I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling, gotta make you understand, never gonna give you up."

Re: #@$Drivers

It seems like these days the driver environment is a mess, back in the early Windows days it wasn't that big a deal to write a new driver when something didn't work or you had created a new thing.

Re: Not enough people in those shots

It's a good YouTube video, nice to watch but think how much better a BBC documentary video production would have been while working with video produced from the drone by the BBC - the BBC has classic film and production people resulting in wonderful documentaries!

Re: Blind testing

I worked with a very good group of programmers in Boston back in the 70's, they were writing code in Pascal and added comments to describe the data and processing - all the comments describing the functionality were written in Bahasa Indonesia - since they were writing in Pascal we all worked well together.

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

Compared to the 60's, the Internet is a new medium - back then I saw a letter in the International Times from a guy in Birmingham who wanted a radio transmitter to get a pirate show going. I replied to him via the International Times and started seeing all letters delivered to me opened before they arrived - apparently the International Times had been searched by the police. Luckily I had already taken the train to Birmingham, met him at the station and given him one of the transmitters that I had been using.

Seeing this happen taught me to behave a little better and very quietly for the rest of my life.

Re: YELLOW CABBIES UNION RIPS INTO INNOVATION

History seems to suggest that the British Empire was just a Tory lunch, yes it wasn't a great lunch but Truss is working on better lunch for the Tories these days.

...we (as in our species) will probably never meet anything from another world.

It's worth looking at how things have gone on our planet when a new species (Columbus etc) arrives in a new area ... Measles was not a problem for Columbus but virtually eliminated all the islanders and many tribes in the Americas. So it's probably best if we just learn to deal with our worlds climate.

Re: Windows - why is it always crap++

I'm still working daily on a Lenovo ThinkPad running Window 7 because it's easy to work with and doesn't stall everything to "upgrade" by adding new bugs. But this morning I found that a new Microsoft Bluetooth mouse will not work with it. Essentially these days it seems that Microsoft does not support its users, it's just busy making everyone buy new hardware and trash their original hardware.

The history of evolution suggests that Microsoft is no longer a "farmer" and has now become a "hunter-gatherer" - we're all just Microsoft's lunch these days.

Re: Don’t try this at home

Good point, so I guess I'm not going to be able to charge my Pixel phone in 2ms then?

I wonder why this idea was never applied to filling up the car petrol tank? Just replace the car petrol tank opening with one that's 24 inches wide and we'd see the same "improvement" ...

Basically this concept just sounds like threatening an occasional big bang at the recharging station.

Re: Very strange

The documents were in readable format and not encrypted so that they could be tracked, every document that gets printed in this environment has unique but very minor changes that are recorded and allow anyone seeing the "revealed" printed document to know who did it.

For example, the original document could say "This is an important document" but the printed version might say "This is a important document" ... a minor change or two in a printed version that allows each unique printed version to be identified but most readers would just read straight past it.

Re: What's the point of a humanoid robot?

Watching a baby start walking on all fours, then gradually moving to semi-upright and eventually running around is a great illustration of how our evolution has happened... but will we eventually evolve to having a 3 year-old sit in a Tesla and telling it to drive across town? But I think that we will keep walking ... even if it's only going to the front door to pickup an Amazon delivery.

Re: They don't care...

Your few million non-sheep people is a very small proportion of the current 7.8 billion total population. So if this becomes a discussion then they are a minority - the total population keeps increasing, so more sheep soon?

Re: It's not just about the money

But effectively "discovering and reporting critical security flaws that could allow foreign spies to steal sensitive US government data or launch cyberattacks via the Department of Defense's IT systems" can get you arrested ...

Re: "weeks after it slowed hiring in the US"

I hired an Indian student who was graduating college in the US back in the 90's, he did great programming for us and then declared that he preferred living back at home so he returned to India - and we kept paying him the original US wages even though he was "working from home" ... LOL, he "retired" after about 15 years, saying that he was then effectively a millionaire in India .. effectively because we hadn't cut his monthly payments. I'm happy for him.

Re: Meh!..Meh, Meh

I wrote assembly software for a device that I created - it generated an clinical quality EKG two channel simulation back in 1979. I wrote it with a pencil because there was no assembler, it was only running on an SD Systems Z80 Starter Kit so it was writen with a pencil, occasional errors were just erased and replaced, then manually coded into an Eprom via the keyboard , it ran great - the link shows the board it was written on.

Re: No hope

"You can't fix stupid" ... but stupid responses can be very educational, helping the observers get an idea of what is going on even if nobody is discussing it. For example, reading the comments in El Reg articles and observing the upvotes vs the downvotes gives me some ideas about what people are thinking. I'm not upset when I get a few downvotes because I simply see it as showing me how people I don't work with in any way are seeing things - that's very educational.

Look at the original descriptions for the "major advantages" of Brexit and what has happened since then for example - we now need to do a lot of work to get everything running again because the original discussion totally ignored all the downvotes - it would have been very helpful if we had all listened, not just ignored what we didn't like.

Re: The subtle approach

A decent size impact or volcanic eruption could "solve" the current climatic issues ... we've been seeing the temperatures go up for nearly 100 years now and have seen not even a reasonably small asteroid strike or substantial volcanic eruption affecting the world.

I'm not saying that we haven't created climate change but I just wonder about the things we've seen in the past that are not happening now ... there's the potential for a big change, we might be able to stop an asteroid strike but we have virtually no control over volcanoes.

Re: NIST TREC QA

Me; "What's a one plus a one?" ... AI; "That's eleven"

Me; "No try again" ... AI; "Sorry, yes it's 10"

Me; "No, decimal, not binary" ... AI; "You are incorrect, two binary 1's create 10 binary."

Me; "Oh yes, the answer is two!" ... AI: "No you are wrong, 2 is not a binary number."

Re: emergency calls?

Thanks for all the explanations.

Re: sunny place for shady people

The Internet is a sunny place for shady people these days ... this is another "climate change" - I remember loving the Internet back in the early days when I first got a fast modem, but these days (as we can see from so many other articles in El Reg today) doing anything on the Internet is a little risky, our incoming mail server malware deliveries have increased this week, with many sailing through the AV checking.