Posts by Arthur the cat

Re: Business model

I do know that having seen another relative in hospital recently they feed them stuff that I literally would not give to my dog.

True. I had a couple of stays in hospital last year and the food was pretty awful. Most calories came in the stodgy puddings with custard, the "main course" was sandwiches for one of lunch/dinner on weekdays and both meals at the weekend, special diets (and they listed a lot of them) often didn't have any options actually available. I got my wife to bring something decent in when she visited.

TheRegister Use of the archaic worn out comedic word "boffins"

The OED does not classify "boffin" as either archaic (it's current) or comedic:

3. British colloquial. In weakened use: an intellectual, an academic, a clever person; an expert in a particular field

TheRegister will loose credibility with the science community

I think you've confused El Reg with Nature. Although I read both, they have differing purposes.

Re: Fuck off you moronic cockwombles

I think "right of passage" is part of consent.

Well, we got a Minister for AI now, does that help?

Given that AI can also mean artificial insemination, I think it means we've got a minister to ensure we're totally fucked but without any of the fun. (Aka: government as normal.)

Re: The government oblivious

According to Oliver Dowden, we should be prepared with battery-powered radios and torches

and candles, which given that we've got very efficient LED lighting and battery packs, is a rather hazardous suggestion for cosplaying that well known manga "1973 Miners' Strike".

Re: WTF?

I usually get ads for the product I've literally just bought.

Ditto. Plus variants on books – you've just bought ${TITLE} by ${AUTHOR} on Kindle, would you like the hardback version, the paperback version, the audiobook, the US edition, the French translation, the German translation, …

Re: dafuq

as an end user you'd have to physically go there to buy things from the factory shop

They do have an online shop, but sadly "Delivery only in Switzerland & Principality of Liechtenstein".

Sigh.

Re: Geography

has a problem when it comes to moving it around at someone's whim.

I'm sure someone at The Boring Company has been tasked with dealing with that.

Re: Screensaver

whatever the Unix was on a Dec alpha

OSF/1

It will be the cats that rule.

Will be??? Wrong tense.

Although MS claims 12Bn licences to "just" 3Bn for PX5, the latter sounds quite healthy to me.

I'd think it very healthy if I had sold 3bn software licences, even at £1 each.

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

Because some (mostly ) already well heeled individuals get lucky and become the super rich we hold them up as if they were somehow brilliant, rather than the statistical outliers that they really are.

We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous.

Written by Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Re: Can't stand IT

The NHSReality is built on incompetent admin staff!

T,FTFY.

Re: Typical architect design

One of my friends is an American architect who's married to a local academic. She once explained to me the difference between US and UK architects. The US generally treats architecture as an engineering discipline, so they design buildings that work but which are boring. In the UK architecture aspires to be a fine art, so the buildings are often splendid to look at(*) but function exceedingly badly as buildings. Every award winning UK building I've ever been exposed to did at least one of 1) leak badly when it rained, 2) get too hot/cold in summer/winter (or the other way round!) or 3) make life very difficult for the occupants(**). It looks like Oz follows the UK.

(*) Or bloody hideous.

(**) Like the only way to move heavy workstations between floors was an open plan spiral staircase - no lifts!

It's "safe enough" after all. At least according to someone that doesn't actually understand security.

Reminiscent of newbies who create their own encryption algorithms "that must be secure because I can't break it and I invented it".

Re: You /what/ Liam?

neither Ada nor ALGOL-68 had an easy/cheap implementation which allowed an engineer or project specifier to take a copy home or run it standalone on his office workstation

Algol 68 rather predated home computers and office workstations. I learnt it (Algol 68R dialect at RRE Malvern) on an ICL 1907F, and I don't think anybody had one of those at home in the early 70s.

Re: Freedoms

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence.

ObXKCD

Re: Magee...

Musk said something dumb again as advertisers pull their ads because they don't like the content on a site

Classic Fuck Around and Find Out (through falling ad revenues). Otherwise known as a natural experiment. I predict there will be a lot of PhD theses in the future, across a variety of disciplines, analysing the demise of Twitter.

Humour is the release valve that allows the mind to deal with horror.

In my younger days I spent a lot of time drinking with doctors, nurses and paramedics. The biggest sources of utterly bleak, and very funny, jokes I've ever met.

Going forward it'll probably end up purely as a vanity project for the likes of Elon Musk and Arab oil sheiks

So long as they have to drive it to get the record. Sort of a rich person's equivalent of the Great Filter.