Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
As a contractor, I've had more than my fair share of usernames. In my current job my username is a 9-digit number.
Though I too have a poor memory for names, I can usually remember a username derived in some way from my real name. But a number is impossible. I daren't log out.
I am not a number, I am a free lancer.
I don't know about the UK but up here in Australia, fuel excise goes straight into consolidated revenue. It's not a road funding system.
Same in the UK. Few taxes are hypothecated, anywhere.
But a "reliable" source tells us, "government revenue from fuel duty in 2009 was £25.894 billion, with a further £3.884 billion being raised from the VAT on the duty contributing some 4 per cent to the total UK tax revenues." That's about £30bn that's going to have to be found somewhere. Either direct taxes go up, or, more likely, electricity gets a two-tier tax system rather like the current system for diesel.
I wonder how the economics of an EV would look if it paid £1200/year in fuel tax?
Not directly relevant, but still an arresting statistic: Britain has twice as many taxpayer-funded electric car charging points as it actually has electric cars.
From the same article:
“If you were to charge a car in 12 minutes for a range of 500 km, for example, you're probably using up electricity required to power 1,000 houses," Yoshikazu Tanaka, a top Toyota engineer, told the Reuters news agency in April. “That totally goes against the need to stabilise electricity use on the grid."
I'm genuinely interested to know.
We all make a habit of deriding the incompetence and failure rate that bedevil givernment IT projects. But you have to wonder why it always happens. Is it failure to analyse the problem domain fully? Poor design skills? Incompetent developers who don't deliver to spec?
If the answer is inadequate skills, why? The days when public sector work was badly-paid are long gone.
I used to assume that scale must be a big factor, but that doesn't seem to be a legitimate excuse here. There are 300,000 farms in the UK, so it's big, but not overwhelming. And financial institutions deal with much larger systems without major issue (except RBS).
The excuse here seems to be "The challenges for a system like rural payments were integrations [around] legacy, third-party supplier...", but that's the case for most systems. It's vanishingly rare to build a system that doesn't have these features.
Unnecessary quotes.
I disagree. The formula x means y has two usages:
x implies y, as in Nuclear war means the end of civilisation.
x can be paraphrased as y, as in Antediluvian means "before Noah's flood".
In this case my intention was something closer to the latter. In other words, not The text referenced in your posting does not imply that everything is permitted, but The text referenced in your posting cannot be summarised as "everything is permitted". To my ear, at least, the two are quite distinct.
A pedantic bastard writes:
That doesn't mean "anything goes". I think you're making the incorrect assumption that prescriptive usage is the basis of pedantry. Not so. What pedants are trying to protect is defined by usage.
As a matter of fact, the errors corrected in postings to El Reg are mostly malapropisms, spelling mistakes, and solecisms such as "there" for "their". These would be wrong in any language community.
As far as I know, the object of copyright law is not so much to prevent publication but to ensure adequate compensation for originators of IP.
If you publish a picture of a historic building, who gets the royalties? Gustave Eiffel (d. 1923), in the case of the Eiffel Tower? William the Conqueror for the Tower of London? Stonehenge, er...?
The Telegraph's online edition has no sub-editors - they publish directly to web without any proofreading or fact-checking of any sort
That explains a lot. I glance at the online Telegraph over breakfast, not because of deep sympathy with its views, but mainly because it's not behind a paywall. I've often been astounded by the typos and sloppy editing.
I appreciate the points made about emergency calls and power cuts*. But it's tempting to say to BT, "OK, it's a deal. You make sure every building that has a POTS connection gets genuine, fast broadband. Then give everybody a free router and as many VoIP phones as they need to replace their old equipment. After you've done all that, we'll scrap the USO."
*I keep an old wired phone for use during power cuts - not least because they're quite frequent in my village. But most people I know rely entirely on wireless phones, which won't work during a power cut.
Why am I more likely to make a type in my email address than anything else? Doesn't everybody just copy and paste it between the fields, anyway?
Yes, but there are a significant number of sites where some bastard UI developer from hell has gone to the trouble of disabling copy and paste in these fields.
I know what you mean. Not so long ago I read Bill Bryson's One Summer: America, 1927. It's a fascinating and entertaining book, except for the two or three chapters where he gets stuck into baseball. Then it becomes a farrago of meaningless decimal statistics about players you've never heard of, playing for teams you've never heard of, achieving feats you don't understand.
Now if it was about cricket... that would be more comprehensible, but just as boring.
I thought I'd Google "slamming" too. The first result was an article from the Independent, summarised thus:
The trend – known as “slamming” – gives users a more intense high and commonly takes places at sex parties which can go on for several ...
So it's not just a case of phone hijacking.
both nations seemingly equally crap at IT
The article reports that the Scottish government and the UK government are both crap at IT*. I believe the British, as a nation, are actually quite good at IT. It's the government that's crap at IT. No surprise there, being crap at things is a government speciality.
*Maybe because they don't know that it isn't called "ICT". Wasn't ICT the name of the company that became ICL?
It's reasonable to assume that the RBS systems have are able to handle exceptions at a transaction level, i.e. reject records that contain bad data, rather than the entire file. If they didn't, problems like the recent one would happen at least once a week.
If a system that can handle bad records rejects a whole file, the likelihood is that the third party that supplies the file has modified the format, either deliberately or accidentally.
To produce reliable figures, you'd need a minimum % of the providers customer base (or of the entire customer base).
Statisticians may correct me, but I was under the impression that statistical significance is determined by a combination of absolute sample size and the relative frequency of the attribute being sampled for. For example, if you're measuring the percentage of population under 20, a sample of 1000 produces results that are equally significant for Cambridgeshire or the whole UK.
I don't think the availability of other languages for the browser will kill JavaScript now. Five years ago, maybe, but today most of its peculiarities have been turned into strengths.
It's very odd. JavaScript spent the first half of its life as the idiot cousin of the family of block-structured procedural languages. Then, apparently without significant change to the language, developers started to bend and twist it to the extent that modern JavaScript looks very different, and can do some remarkable things.
Personally I still find working in JavaScript makes me feel like I'm going round Hyde Park Corner on a bicycle, and it's exasperating the way every month brings a new best-ever framework or library. But these days it doesn't owe its continued existence to the fact that it's the only thing that runs in the browser.
Email isn't (shouldn't be) a filing system...
Why? Most email clients go out of their way to provide filing-system-like features such as hierarchical folders.
Important documents should be kept in a version controlled respostory.
Maybe, but emails, however important, are intrinsically different from version-controlled documents. It's rare for an email to be modified, as opposed to being copied into another email.
Why mess about with browser-level filters? Almost all big companies access the Internet via a proxy server, and in my experience the proxy server also filters content. I should have thought that ad-blocking would be a logical extension.
I use Privoxy at home, but I don't know whether it has the capability required of a corporate proxy.
Pour petrol on it.
Exactly. If the team in the story was gifted with any ingenuity, they could have made Tim's life hell.
Take the example of not committing router config to NVRAM: it shouldn't be hard to make sure Tim gets to reconfigure one router an hour throughout the day and night.
DLR project manager Dr Stephen Ulamec explained the probe's current status
I think it's fantastic that in this day and age we have a commuter railway that can convey a probot to a comet millions of miles away in space. Did Dr Ulamec also offer an explanation for the delays at Canary Wharf? Perhaps you should have got an explanation from somebody at Network Rail as well.
(It's the only reference to DLR in the article, and a Google search for those initials returns a page of results about the Docklands Light Railway.)
the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photograph of Earth taken from an Apollo spacecraft, the first time the author claims that humanity could see itself as a whole
It's a beautiful photograph, but my recollection is that the most striking thing about it was that it was just as expected. Terrestrial globes had shown the world in a similar way for centuries. It's a bit like the way the view from a plane window changes from surroundings to map as you climb.
an assistant will HAVE to track your speech patterns, habits, friends and generally 'know' a ton about you to even get close to being as good as a human PA
But why does it need Internet connectivity to do all this? Modern computers have plently of local storage. This is especially annoying on phones:
Cortana, how do I get a network connection?
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't tell you that without a network connection.
To judge from the pictures, this thing will be dangling just below an HDMI port. On all the TVs I've seen (not, admittedly, a large number), the HDMI ports are at the back, so the dongle will be out of sight. All the remote controls I've used communicate by infra-red, and so need line-of-sight to the receiver. Does the Amazon dongle use RF or something?
I have read in the past that it's easier to get compensation from a council if the pothole has previously been reported to them, presumably because they have willfully neglected to repair it. If that's the case then it can only be a good thing if there's a continuous electronic stream of reports being submitted by cars.
Let me be the first to confess that my knowledge of this kind of computing, and indeed of statistics, is rudimentary. Perhaps that's why I'm having trouble understanding some of this article.
computational algorithms that produce results that can be explained in terms of certainty – the probability that a given will take place
Which is it, certainty or probability? They surely can't be the same thing, even in the domain of weather forecasting.
...customers who make sophisticated, risk-based decisions can benefit from having probabilistic rather than deterministic decision on events of weighing up the probable chances of an outcome rather than working with a black and white.
Come again? I can imagine it's a challenge to render this stuff into plain journalistic English, and I sympathise wholeheartedly. But that last para seems to be the product of some kind of random word generator.
The researchers reckon they've powered temperature and camera sensors at 20 feet and 17 feet respectively. Coin-cell batteries can be charged at greater distances.
I believe you can actually buy power cables in 20-foot lengths (maybe even more if you go to a specialist shop). As the WiFi router is presumably connected to a power source of its own, it might just be possible, with the right technology, to share the power between both devices. Further research is needed.
I wouldn't describe Kingsway as "central West London". That sounds more like Hammersmith.
Depending on your criteria, Kingsway about as central London as you can get. Bank is probably the centre of the Roman city, but Aldwych, at the bottom of Kingsway, is named after Lundenwic, the Saxon trading settlement.
Was the expression "central West London" derived from the fact that Kingsway has a WC2 postcode?
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