Posts by Kubla Cant

Re: Video Rental

I remember the Video Rental Shop Experience. You sign up, and spend a few weeks in movie heaven, watching all the great films you missed at the cinema. Then you spend a few weeks watching some quite good films you've never heard of followed by a few more weeks watching increasingly crappy films you've never heard of. Sadly, this experience seems to be replicated over a slightly longer timescale by Netflix and Amazon.

And why do both these services fill the screen with suggestions for films I have no desire to see? I suspect that their recommendations system takes no account of the many films I switch off after the first 10 minutes.

Re: As I've said before

Some years ago I made some purchases from eBay using a PayPal account linked to my credit card. In due course I received an email from PayPal saying "you've spent so much money that you can't use your credit card any more - please link your PayPal account to your bank account". After the briefest consideration I decided that wasn't a good idea.

Sounds like I had a lucky escape.

An app-controlled ... coffee maker would appear to make more sense, because you can turn on the device remotely

And having turned it on remotely, what then? Depending on the type of coffee-maker, you'll have various tasks like loading coffee and heating milk that can't be done remotely. Even if you have a bean-to-cup machine that stores and refrigerates its own milk, you'll find it hard to drink the coffee via a phone app.

The Romans would have had more sense than to schedule a census over the Christmas holiday period.

Re: criminalising the flying of any drone within three miles of a licensed aerodrome.

I have to say that the word "aerodrome" conjures up images of Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper at Croydon. Are aerodromes still a thing?

Re: Unexpected result of digital cameras

Much as I love to listen to No Such Thing As A Fish, I wouldn't take their word on a technical issue. I've heard one or two episodes where they betray surprising ignorance. Bear in mind that these people are connected to QI.

Re: ASA (After Stabledoor Ajar)

ASA? More like ASLR.

Analogue Single Lens Reflex?

Re: Changing her underwear to be cotton instead of nylon solved the problem.

Sounds as if the other operators and you pulled off her pants. Presumably you mean "asking her to change her underwear...".

Re: Actual effect?

don't scam people from the same country you are living in

Mostly they don't. Which raises the question of why the telephone companies of the world have the technology to make calls from overseas look like they have a domestic origin, but it's beyond their ability to provide a way for the recipients to know the origin. Any use of domestic numbers for calls from overseas is an attempt to deceive.

Because, Agile

Crap QA has nothing to do with agile.

There's nothing in agile development that says you have to be careless or deploy untested code. In a well-run project, nothing gets into development without a clear set of acceptance criteria that are subsequently used to validate the work.

I don't recall any of the waterfall projects I used to work on having superior QA. The way waterfall works tends to mean that QA is crammed into whatever time is left over before the delivery deadline, and the components being tested are more complex.

HTML is hard

It's utterly depressing to think that somebody is actually coding this stuff in HTML. Surveys are one of the ultimate commodity web applications.

Re: Voice response phone

every 20 seconds during the music on hold, you get an announcement

I especially hate this. You can put the phone on speaker, zone out the hold music, and get on with some work or surf the web*. But every 20 seconds you're jerked to attention as the music fades and you think you're about to get a human on the line.

*do people still say "surf the web"?

Re: Is the drive-thru 3 laws safe?

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't serve that.

Dave: What's the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?

HAL: Your health is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Re: Fahrenheit?

If your recipe calls for a drachm of soda, a gill of milk...

That's tricky. An imperial gill is quarter of a pint, but in the north of England a gill can be half a pint. A gill of ale won't get you drunk, but it's not as abstemious as it sounds.

Re: Deliberately obnoxious

Long ago I watched a very funny English-language comedy film in Oslo. It was subtitled, and because most people can read faster than talk, the punchline of every joke was inaudible because the audience had already started to laugh.

Re: However, that turned out to be incorrect.

Don't forget the inelegant weasel-word "mis-spoke".

Re: At werdsmith.

Despite all the invective directed at hooligans in Lycra, the menace on the pavement is usually clad in everyday clothes and riding a cheap bike with soft tyres and a low saddle.

By way of contrast, on my walk from station to office I regularly have to dodge a dickhead on a scooter who's wearing knee-pads, protective gloves and a crash helmet. If he thinks his mode of transport is that dangerous, perhaps he should get off the pavement.

Re: Guilty Secret

If BT is your ISP you get something called "BT Yahoo". I've recently stopped using it, but on the whole it's been reliable and feature-rich.

Re: This is stupid

re: UML, flowcharts etc.

1. Not usually blue

2. More relevantly, the article says "rid the software blueprints of language", and strongly suggests that they're editing the code. If the Daily Mail calls code "software blueprints", it's unsurprising, but i expect better from El Reg.

Re: Bribery over a new server

This is where dictatorships get it wrong, nobody is allowed/too scared to make a decision beyond following orders.

Apparently one of the greatest strengths of the German army during WW2 was its capacity to improvise and adapt. So not all dictatorships get this part wrong.

Re: contain elements that could run out in the near future

Radio 4 News this morning said something like "indium is going to run out in 100 years".

It's been pointed out on el Reg before that "known supplies of x" is a measure of the cost/benefit of searching for more x, rather than an indication of the amount of actual quantity of x.

BBC News web page says: "Take it to your local tip," advised Stuart Price from Electrical Waste Recycling in Huddersfield. "Or a retailer - distributors actually have an obligation to take back material when you buy a new product from them."

I wonder how much I have to buy to make a retailer accept the past 20 years of obsolete computer bits in my cupboards? And will he recycle it, or just dump it in the bin out back?

Re: Git

I can only imagine that none of the contributors to this thread has ever used Visual Sourcesafe.

Re: Dry patch

In the event of a dry patch, send off some emojis to the right people, and with any luck you'll end up sleeping in a wet patch.

Re: What ?

2. Alice discovers later her debit card is missing.

So far, so good.

So far, so good, except for the fact that a stolen debit card has magically become a stolen phone.

Re: Almost a great article

It turns out Juno is the orbiter that produced these measurements. I had to read it in Ars Technica.

Re: every single page

Because Its A Stupid Pointless Exercise!!

I see. So next time I'm required to sign the contract for a job, I'll just reply that some guy on a forum says it's a stupid, pointless exercise. I expect I'll have a lot of free time in future.

Get real. It's one of many stupid things we have to do for stupid people.