* Posts by Kubla Cant

2803 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Kubla Cant

"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

It's the deductive equivalent of:

"How do you sculpt Michelangelo's David?"

"You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David."

BOFH: What if International Bad Actors designed the vaccine to make us watch more Steven Seagal movies?

Kubla Cant

Re: I can disprove that

A clear indication that nanobots are stealing all your bandwidth.

Kubla Cant

Re: Surfing nanobots

You can cheaply and reliably prevent nanobot infection by wearing a polythene bag over your head.

A tiny typo in an automated email to thousands of customers turns out to be a big problem for legal

Kubla Cant

Re: Not is such a tiny word

This appears to be an urban myth

Not so. I'm old enough to remember n****r-brown being used, I think for the colour of a dog (which is consistent with the Guy Gibson usage). The word was already offensive, and the people using it were probably middle-aged.

My wife, who is American, tells me that when she was young the name for liquorice sweets similar to Pontefract cakes was n****r-toes. I don't suppose that was the name on the packet.

Kubla Cant

Re: Not is such a tiny word

Such as the dog belonging to Squadron Leader Guy Gibson that was run over just before the Dams raid. These days I imagine they cut or overdub the scenes where the dog is named.

BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

Kubla Cant

Re: Same energy

Does she really work at soldering in that outfit (there's solder on the workbench)? Looks a bit vulnerable.

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

Kubla Cant

Re: That number does not compute

I expect your Hong Kong customer was called Run Len.

One click, one goal, one mission: To get a one-touch flush solution

Kubla Cant

Re: Is it for prople who don't wash their hands?

Depends on the type of work you do. A rocket scientist will presumably wash his hands after using the toilet. A motor mechanic may well choose to wash before.

Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

Kubla Cant

Era of innocence

Never mind Satisfaction and Let's spend the night together, I'm surprised you fail to mention this February 1969 er, release from M Gainsbourg?

All I want for Christmas is a delivery address that a delivery courier can find

Kubla Cant

My address is $NUMBER High Street, $VILLAGE. The house is in the middle of the village and abuts directly on to the High Street, with no front garden. It has a sign on the front wall with $NUMBER in digits four inches high. Despite this I get people (notably, an electric meter reader for whom I stayed home specially) telling me they can't find the house.

I suspect that it's the fault of the Royal Mail. Before postcodes. they insisted that addresses include a "post town", often a place some way off that was only associated with a location by virtue of the fact that mail was sorted there. Despite the fact that mail is now sorted by postcode, a designation that specifies a much smaller area than the post town, there still seems to be a rule that an address must include a post town.

Online address lookups will often return $NUMBER High Street, $POSTTOWN $POSTCODE, without the village name. The result is people who don't navigate by postcode expecting to find my house in $POSTTOWN, 15 miles away.

Is it a bridge? Is it a ferry? No, it's the Newport Transporter

Kubla Cant

The temptation to avoid pulling the chain while the gondola was passing below must have been very hard to resist.

I could be wrong, but I think that means roughly the opposite of what was intended.

Kubla Cant

Re: "Decline and...

We'll know we've reached the next stage of collapse when the government is replaced by a bunch of goths.

Ostro or Visi?

Tech contractors fume over payday outage at Giant Pay after it sniffs 'suspicious activity'

Kubla Cant

Re: collage educated

Yeah, but when you have a collage education, everything sticks!

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Kubla Cant

Re: Stress test!

What happened when it was deployed to customers and one of them typed** "ZYOC P ST I"? No biscuit?

** Sounds more like a Collossal Cave command than an "enterprise software" system.

Kubla Cant

Re: As a young broadcast engineer, unschooled in IT at the time

Is this assertion based on actual knowledge? Or do you just see every discussion forum as a group of people eager to read your prolitical prejudices?

Microsoft does and doesn't require VMs to meet hardware requirements for Windows 11

Kubla Cant

Re: This may sound crazy, but

Why not just launch when it's ready?

Because they'd never launch it.

Ex-DJI veep: There was no drone at Gatwick during 2018's hysterical shutdown

Kubla Cant

Re: One word: DUH!

Occam's, or possibly Hanlon's.

You want us to make a change? We can do it, but it'll cost you...

Kubla Cant

Re: Screw-up?

Yes.

I expected that the file would grow for ever, or at least until the available storage was exhausted. If the original code created a new file every time, then that was presumably the only file creation. Replace that with code that always appends...

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

Kubla Cant

Re: Ah, a first time user

Nearly everybody knows not to use hard carriage returns, but it's surprising how often you see evidence of hard hyphens (unnecess-arily hyphen-ated words in the middle of a line - presumably the word was broken over two lines in the original). Other fossils of typewriter use that you see occasionally are lower-case L for numeral 1 and numeral zero for upper-case O.

Spot the dog? No, we couldn't either because Spot is a robot employed by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

Kubla Cant

Re: RotM

The Boston Dynamics videos include several sequnces where ther demonstrate the recovery capability of robots by trying to push them over.

When a two-legged, anthropoid machine staggers but stays standing, my reaction is "That's impressive engineering". When it's the four-legged version, I can't help thinking "Don't be cruel to the doggy".

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

Kubla Cant

In my experience, Windows does not render them very well

That's OK. As long as they display correctly in the operating system most people use.

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Kubla Cant

It's absurd that American university societies should trademark their names. I think they're taking themselves too seriously.

Kubla Cant

Indeed. As far as I'm concerned Spring is a dependency injection framework, and I was bemused to learn they were in the T-shirt printing business.

Beige Against the Machine: The IBM PC turns 40

Kubla Cant

Re: Edlin

And here's the source for edlin. 1845 lines of nicely-formatted assembler.

v2.00 has lots of files for the command-line programs. v1.25 just has seven files, including the source for the assembler used to build it. Cute!

Elevating bork to a new level (if the touchscreen worked)

Kubla Cant

messages you don't want to see in an elevator a lift

I remember boarding a lift and being somewhat concerned to see on a plaque inside that it was serviced by the Economical Lift Maintenance Company.

Kubla Cant

Re: No need for any fancy tech

I don't think I'd fancy a paternoster lift that serviced 34 floors. Either it would take half an hour to reach the top floor*, or it would move fast enough to amputate limbs from passengers who aren't agile enough.

* and that's where the bar is

Zorin OS 16 Pro arrives complete with optional 'Windows 11' desktop

Kubla Cant
WTF?

Re: Laudable ambition

"we're trying to make an operating system that is simple to manage, set and forget, and also really stable"

And Windows seems like a good example to follow?

Kubla Cant

Moving to Bloatware or Fruit is a fairly simple process of handing over some money and saying "give me a copy of that operating system please my good man".

I agree with your general point, but I suspect that the scenario above is vanishingly rare. Most people just buy a computer. They have no real idea that the O/S is a separate thing.

It's similar to the way that the browser is "the internet", and the broadband connection is "the wifi" (as in the commonly-heard "I wouldn't want to live in an area that has poor wifi").

Q: Post-lockdown, where would I like to go? A: As far away from my own head as possible

Kubla Cant
WTF?

Inaudible Mode

playback at the lowest level of volume to diffuse the bio active sonic vibrations without hearing the music

This seems to be a thing with German cars, of which I have two. If you switch off the car audio, it will come back on next time you start the car. But it does so at an almost inaudible volume, so you spend the next hour driving around while searching for the source of the annoying whispering sound, and maybe concluding that you're hearing voices in your head.

It's almost as bad if you turn the car off while the audio is playing. When you restart it comes on at about half the volume you left it at, so you spend the first five minutes fiddling with the controls to get it back the way you like it. I remember old-fashioned, pre-digital audio where you could set the volume once and it would be right for the life of the car.

And why is Bluetooth streamed audio always at a small fraction of the volume of other audio sources, including BT phone calls? It's just a digital transmission, so it has no intrinsic volume. Somebody just decided to play BT music in inaudible mode.

Great reset? More like Fake Reset: Leaders need a reality check if they think their best staff will give up hybrid work

Kubla Cant

Re: Have I landed on a different planet?

I don't know what the actual traffic is like now, but the roads certainly don't look empty in 2021. It seems at least possible that some commuters might avoid public transport because of infection risk.

Is it broken yet? Is it? Is it? Ooh that means I can buy a sparkly, new but otherwise hard-to-justify replacement!

Kubla Cant
Mushroom

Dump

Take it to the dump, er, recycling centre?

Chance would be a fine thing. Cambridgeshire CC has instituted an appointments system at the recycling centre tip. Because Covid.

The tip is open-air, and it's not exactly a venue for intense socialisation - you get out of the car, dump your stuff, get back in the car and drive away. From 19 July people are allowed into all kinds of indoor social situations. We've been shopping together in supermarkets for the past few months.

But the tip booking system remains in force and only allows one car every 15 minutes.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

Kubla Cant

Re: Your headline reminds me...

And yet a rubber (eraser) is so-called because it's used to rub things out. The stuff that oozes out of trees gets its name from the the eraser.

Rubbers are used in all sorts of other activities, for example French polishing (though that comes with its own burden of innuendo).

Kubla Cant
Headmaster

Re: Your headline reminds me...

how is a vaxen...

A Vax, plural (jocose) Vaxen.

Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Sub-$600 midranger makes premium phones feel frivolous

Kubla Cant

Genuine question: is it better to buy a superseded top-of-the-range Samsung phone that's now modestly priced, or a new mid-range model like this?

Western Approaches Museum: WRENs, wargames, and victory in the Atlantic

Kubla Cant

Re: Alas, here we go again...

I'm afraid I've no idea who Matthias Matussek is, or why we should be interested in his opinion of British history teachers.

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I find "not a German problem, but a British one" unreasonable. Germany started not one, but two, world wars in the space of 50 years, and we're expected to believe that it was all the fault of somebody else. Nobody belonged to the Nazi party, the concentration camps were staffed by a few bad apples, the SS were really not that bad, and army were all just ordinary guys doing a difficult job.

It reminds me of "You shag one sheep...".

Where's the boss? Ah right, thorough deep-dive audit. On the boardroom table. Gotcha

Kubla Cant

It may have been bad, but it wasn't the worst job they ever had. No lobsters.

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

Kubla Cant

Totally unsurprising

when the BCS looked at the ages of the 1.6 million UK-based IT specialists, it found that just 22 per cent of them were over 50 years old

Actually, it's surprising that the figure is as high as 22%. Assuming a retirement age of 60, a working life of 40 years, and a flat distribution, there should be 25% for each life decade. But the distribution won't be flat because:

(a) The population of working IT specialists has increased massively over the past four decades as a consequence of the growth in IT. You can't just recruit equally from the older age cohorts because they simply don't exist.

(b) A proportion of older IT specialists will have moved to senior managerial jobs. Not many young employees are qualified to make this move.

Kubla Cant

Re: Black, Indigenous, People of Colour

The indigenous people of Britain are the British. So I suppose BIPOC means "nearly everybody".

Kubla Cant

A dinosur writes...

I've worked in IT for about 39 years, and it wasn't my first career, so I'm confident I qualify as a dinosaur. As a contractor, I've had 18 jobs over this period, which I think gives me pretty wide experience of the IT employment environment.

It goes without saying that everybody's always much younger than me. Whether that makes them more flexible or in touch with the latest technologies* is less certain. They're bright and quick, and perhaps they learn faster, but there's no doubt that some are spreading their existing corpus of knowledge very thin. It's depressing and frustrating to see the same mistakes made in one place after another.

I suppose I have my own prejudices. Software engineering offers few opportunities for career advancement apart from promotion out of engineering into some managerial function. A "senior software engineer" is basically just a better-paid code monkey. I tend to view anyone who has been doing much the same job in the same company for many years - the sort of people IBM gets rid of - as lacking enterprise. But that's a typical contractor attitude.

* The latest technologies - popular with suicidally adventurous companies.

Who would cross the Bridge of Death? Answer me these questions three! Oh and you'll need two-factor authentication

Kubla Cant

Re: Ah Captcha!

whatever pedestrian crossings are in French

Based on my experience of French drivers, it's cibles légitimes.

To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA? Gartner analyst says OK — but don’t be robotic about it

Kubla Cant

Re: Street signs

Similar to silly walks, but madder.

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

Kubla Cant

Light reading

If you're going to "heave" a book at someone, I can think of better choices than K&R. At 288 pages, it will scarcely make an impact.

On first looking into K&R, I was equally impressed by its technical value and its monetary cost of about 10p per page. I see the cover price is now £49.49, more than 17p per page.

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

Kubla Cant

Re: No gravestone for me

Multistorey graves used to be fairly common, though I think it was mostly done by piling the interments on top of each other, rather than raising the ground level. John Donne's poem The Relic begins "When my grave is broke up again / Some second guest to entertain".

Kubla Cant

Re: Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph

At least it's stone-faced, but it has a bit of a New Bodleian look to it. The architects of that horror evidently felt that what the Sheldonian and the Clarendon Building needed was something reminiscent of the Atlantikwall opposite.

Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise

Kubla Cant

a climbing wall with a fire exit in the middle of it

I know what you mean, but I can't get rid of a mental picture of a bright red fire door ten feet off the ground. In case of fire, you have 60 seconds to teach yourself rock-climbing.

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Kubla Cant

Re: Examples...

That sounds more like a cache to me.

Kubla Cant

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

always, always referred to as the "hard drive" by these people

Except when it's the "memory".

How many remote controls do you really need? Answer: about a bowl-ful

Kubla Cant

CD Drawer

What was ever the point about a CD drawer operated from the remote control? I've lost count of the number of CDs I've ruined by trying to throw them across the room into the drawer. And even people who are deft enough to be able to do this will have to get up and take the old disk out.

And while I'm ranting, what are "special characters"? They may be special to you mate, but they're just non-alphanumerics to me. My special characters, for which I have an undying regard, are "s", "p", "e", "c", "i", "a" and "l".

It's the UK contractor tax factor: IR35 outsiders gaining leverage in skills market, survey finds

Kubla Cant

Re: Seems that the market functions like the Internet

My impression over the past few months is that rates are increasing for contracts inside IR35. But I doubt that they've increased enough to cover the additional costs for most contractors.

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

Kubla Cant

Re: "unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators"

If your gaming included Microsoft Solitaire Collection then you'd see plenty of adverts.