"Politics is show business for ugly people" (various attributions)
Posts by Kubla Cant
2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
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Election? Pah. Here's the REAL question: Who’s the SEXIEST MP?
Self-STOPPING cars are A Good Thing, say motor safety bods
Semi-self-driving
I recently acquired a car that has a Limit button on the steering wheel. It's something I would never have expected to use, but it turns out it's quite valuable. Maintaining a speed below 30 requires a slice of attention that can be reallocated to things like looking out for pedestrians and trying to open CD cases. The only oddity is the way the car seems to slow down once the de-restriction sign becomes visible.
Alongside features like automatic emergency braking and adaptive cruise control, it makes me wonder whether the effort going into self-driving cars would be more usefully applied to devising a hybrid control model, where the car handles control functions that can be automated relatively easily, while the drive continues to handle the difficult stuff like steering and trying to open CD cases.
How Groucho Marx lost his voice and found his funny bone
Attack of the possibly-Nazi clone parakeet invaders
Massive police 'heavy equipment' robot drags out suspect who hid inside television
Scot Nationalists' march on Westminster may be GOOD for UK IT
Re: Be Careful what you wish for.@SolidSquid
If we did leave the Union we wouldn't be subjected to nineteen-sixty-fucking-six football pish *every* *fucking* *four* *years*.
I haven't the slightest idea what you're trying to say, but the ranting tone and foul language seem to be an example of exactly the kind of toxic behaviour you are deprecating.
Re: Be Careful what you wish for.
@SolidSquid
Actually Scotland joined the union because the nobility bankrupted themselves (the Darien Scheme was a private venture, not a state one)
What sort of state venture do you imagine might have existed in late 17th Century Scotland? If the beneficiaries of the bail-out were posessed of sufficient power to "sell out the country", then they were to all intents and purposes the state.
Even so, I think after 215 years it's probably time to forget about the Darien episode.
@Nigel Whitfield
I keep hearing how "England is weary of the noise" and other such stuff, but only from people on forums. Where are these English people who hate the Scottish so much, or just want them to go away?
I've never met any such person in real life
So we can disregard your view because it comes from one of the "people on forums"?
At the risk of falling foul of the same self-denying ordinance, permit me to say that I am very, very weary of the noise. I don't "hate the Scottish". What I do hate is narrow sectional interests that want to get everybody else dancing to their tune. I don't care if it's the SNP, the TUC, the RAC, Arthur Scargill or the Society for the Independence of Pimlico.
The SNP received 1,454,436 votes out of an electorate of more than 46,353,900. A lot more than Arthur Scargill, admittedly, but still less than 0.7%. I call that noise.
Major London rail station reveals system passwords during TV documentary
Smile! Brit transport plods turn bodycams on travelling public
New EU security strategy: Sod cyber terrorism, BAN ENCRYPTION
"stop IT firms offering encryption"
Of course. Because when a terrorist wants to send secret messages he goes down to PC World and buys a yard of encryption.
Anyone who develops in Java will be familiar with the idiotic scenario where you can only download so-called Strong Cryptography libraries if you promise not to pass them on to the bad guys.
Free markets aren't rubbish – in fact, they solve our rubbish woes
'Use 1 capital' password prompts make them too predictable – study
Re: Password generators
Here's an entropy aware pass phrase generator I really like:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/javascrypt/pass_phrase.html
Yikes! I flatter myself that I have a good vocabulary, but a high proportion of the passphrases contain unfamiliar, foreign or obscure words.
overnice bowline sceptic octopus pleopod sentientlicorice patroon miler bondman tramline dicker
par compo gyrus carolus rejoice jack
whoreson winding digit lozenge skiplane hopper
refer hyoscine nude ala fender piton
resign hawfinch enshrine assignor boast heliport
compos trigraph slacks genital corpsman akene
matchbox squeaky plump haloid sapwood metallic
byelaw smallish turbit marking afforest praetor
Stuff your RFID card, just let me through the damn door!
Re: Spot on description of acess control purgatory.
A few years ago I worked at a site where the bogs were only accessible from the secured area but were shared between two companies in adjacent offices. The result was that you needed a pass to get out of the bog. The passes were managed from 100 miles away by a nest of jobsworths who used to cancel them in an arbitrary way in the middle of the working day. You can guess where I was when my pass got cancelled.
More recently I've encountered a system where you need a pass to get out as well as in, and where the doors send you a stroppy email if you aren't meticulous about closing them behind you.
Welcome, stranger: Inside Microsoft's command line shell
Not dead yet
Curously, there seems to be evidence that the command prompt in Windows still has a tiny spark of life in it. (Or maybe I'm late discovering features in the obscure and hard-to-find documentation.) "set /?" now delivers three screens of help, and includes features like string replacement and delayed variable expansion. You can write surprisingly capable scripts now. Unfortunately there seems to be some rule that any new feature has to be invoked by obscure metacharacters. I suspect that this is a legacy of the original feeble MS-DOS parser.
I'm reasonably sure that the first versions of MS-DOS did offer command-line editing. It used function keys F1 to F9(?) and it's still available in Windows 7, although some of the functions now produce a popup prompt which obviously wasn't there in MS-DOS.
The huge flaw in Moore’s Law? It's NOT a law after all
Re: Spelling Police
I was also bemused by this:
... the number of transistors used in a typical CPU — the CPU transistor count — would double ....
Given that this is a techie site I should think most readers would be able to guess that the number of transistors used in a typical CPU is also known as "the CPU transistor count".
What's broken in this week's Windows 10 build? Try the Start Menu, for one
Re: Company bloat/inertia?
When I read the article I was astounded to see reports of problems with things like Outlook and Visual Studio. The clear implication is that the operating system and the layered applications are so entangled that changes to the system break the applications.
Microsoft has a track record of making secret APIs available to its own applications, and it looks like it's come back to bite them.
Booking.com smacked by EU competition bods. Yeah, yeah, yeah
Zoo
The whole hotel booking site world is like a zoo. You've got booking sites doing deals with hotels, booking sites doing deals with bedbanks, booking sites that consolidate from other booking sites, possibly including other consolidators, and so ad infinitum. Over and above that is the suspicion that the hotel puts you in a crap room when you use a booking site.
I've never used Booking.com. As other commentards have pointed out, they rarely seem to be the cheapest, which makes this story rather surprising.
Google versus the EU: Sigh. You can't exploit a contestable monopoly
Apple will cut down 36,000 acres of forest in 'conservation scheme'
Trees are a crop
The idea that cutting trees in this way is anti-conservation is plain stupid.
They aren't cutting primal broadleaf woodland or tropical rain forest. The softwood trees that are used for paper and packaging are grown for the purpose. Less timber-based packaging means fewer trees, not more. It's a crop, and it's only grown because there is a market for it. You might as well try to conserve wheat by eating less bread.
The Internet of things is great until it blows up your house
Scummy transients FOUND ON MARS by NASA rover
Re: Instead of making feeble jokes about a typo
Far from improving my self-esteem, it's made me feel rather guilty. My intention was to conform to the Reg posting style, which usually has much in common with the fish-slapping dance.
I hope your cold gets better soon.
MIT shows off machine-learning script to make CREEPY HEADS
Re: guff
@LucreLout : I agree heartily with what you say, and I've even upvoted you.
But I can't avoid the suspicion that when you say "Queue lots and lots of things that were never a pattern being ..." you probably mean "Cue lots and lots ...". The metaphor refers to the stage (or possibly film and TV studios), as in "Cue music, cue lights, cue Hamlet".
Aussie priest BLESSES an APP – and the sacred iPad it runs on
Radio 4 and Dr K on programming languages: Full of Java Kool-Aid
Re: "soi-disant"?
I see that Simon Rockman, the author of the condescending soi-disant expression, is billed as "Mobile and Motoring Correspondent".
His description of it as “what we used to use before HTML 5” suggests he's less knowledgable about programming languages than phones and cars. I can only imagine he's referring to Applets, which haven't been a significant area of Java use for at least ten years. The vast majority of Java runs on servers, where “write once, run anywhere” is in fact true.
Since the soi in this case is a woman, surely it should be soi-disante?
Streaming tears of laughter as Jay-Z (Tidal) waves goodbye to $56m
Re: CD Quality
Tidal is revolutionary in offering “CD-quality” downloads
No it isn't. I regularly buy CD-quality downloads from Presto Classical, and have been doing so for some time. I'm sure most online music retailers offer a similar service. Presto Classical also offer "Studio-quality" downloads, but I haven't got the audio equipment (or the ears) to justify the extra cost.
Eyes on the prize: Ten 23-24-inch monitors for under £150
Problems with Asus monitor
I recently bought an Asus VN247H - I don't know what's the difference between this and the reviewed VE247H.
I almost immediately returned it. The stand was so flimsy that the screen would wobble as I typed (maybe I should cut out the strength pills). But the main problem was that it caused the operating system to freeze. I first saw this with Ubuntu 14.10, so I backed off to 14.04, but the problem remained. Within 15 min of logging in, the system froze and required a hard reboot. Following a change of monitor, no problem.
I was surprised about this, because I imagined that the monitor is a purely passive peripheral. Maybe the problem was with driver software, but this too is surprising, as I certainly didn't install any drivers and I should have thought all 1920x1080 HDMI monitors would be identical from the perspective of the O/S.
Google cracks down on browser ad injectors after shocking study
Re: Unwanted ad injectors aren't part of a healthy ads ecosystem
@Pete H Which will come when "users" realise they also have a right to pay for the content they are consuming on the internet.
OK Pete, you've convinced me. Can you provide a list of the sites that are worth paying for so that we can all subscribe?
SPY FRY: Smart meters EXPLODE in Californian power surge
Re: Distribution architecture vulnerability
in the UK that generally applies to houses built since electricity was discovered
My house was built in about 1760 and expanded in 1810*. The original supply was via overhead poles, but the whole village seems to have been converted to underground supply about 30 years ago. When they did this, they seem to have removed the supply from the pole but couldn't be bothered to route an underground supply into the house. Instead they left a pair of bare copper wires running on insulated brackets along the side of the house and connected to the mains by a cable laid across my neighbour's roof and down his front wall into the street. He recently needed his chimney swept, but the sweep wisely declined to go anywhere near the live exposed copper wires.
* I suppose the later date is after electricity was discovered, depending on what you mean by "discovered", but it's definitely before electricity was supplied.
Locally Integrated Menus back on Vivid Vervet’s menu
Local menus new?
Maybe I misunderstand, but the review seems to say that local menus are new in 15.04. I have had local menus in 14.04 for some time now. ISTR I had to change a setting to get them, but it was no big deal.
The trouble is that Unity menus don't actually work as well as traditional menus. Possibly because of the auto-hide feature, it's sometimes necessary to click a menu item more than once to invoke it. Even Windows 3.0 had menus that worked as expected.
It's the FALKLANDS SYNDROME! Fukushima MELTDOWN to cause '10,000 Chernobyls' in South Atlantic
Forum chat is like Clarkson punching you repeatedly in the face
Smart meters are a ‘costly mistake’ that'll add BILLIONS to bills
Audi TT: It's NOT a hairdresser-mobile, the dash is too flash
Re: I just want a dumb car
The owner could update it whenever they felt the need with their choice of units from any one of a dozen suppliers.
Sadly, eleven of the dozen suppliers were to be found in pub carparks*. While living in a respectable area of London I once had two head units stolen in as many weeks. The main advantage of integrated head units is that they seem to discourage theft.
* The logic behind this trade mystifies me. Even at the time, it was nearly impossible to buy a car without a radio. The only market for stolen head units must have been people who had just had their own stolen. Most of them would probably buy a new one on insurance, so the market must have been seriously oversupplied. I suppose the economics don't register when you're funding a crack habit.
Re: Infotainment?
I'm pleased to find that I'm not the only driver to ask my passenger to select a destination on the satnav because it's safer than trying to do it while driving. How will you do that when the screen and controls are in the instrment binnacle?
Curiously, my current car won't let anybody use the on-screen instruction manual while the car is moving, but it will let you access the interwebs, subject to a mild warning.
Mature mainframe madness prints Mandlebrot fractal in TWELVE MINUTES
Re: Pi in the, er, print
Indeed. The VAX had the usual integer and float types, plus BCD, which, if I remember correctly, stores two decimal digits per byte, plus zoned decimal, which is essentially ASCII, one decimal character per byte with a sign bit added to the least significant digit. Zoned decimals were much used in the DIBOL language.
I'm also reasonably sure that I remember using BCD on a 16-bit microprocessor, but I can't recall which one. There must have been some kind of support for BCD for me to have thought of using it.
Amazon issued with licence for delivery drone madness
Hello? Police? Yes, I'm a car and my idiot driver's crashed me
Old news
The first car I had with this kind of feature was manufactured in 2007, and it's been present on every subsequent car. There's a SIM in a little compartment above the rear-view mirror. I believe I can initiate a call myself, but it will do it spontaneously in case of a severe crash. I have no idea how it evaluates the severity.
I'd guess that it's also used for the car's internet connection. It's not dependent on my personal phone in any way.
Blighty's 12-sided quid to feature schoolboy's posterior
Coin-swallowing machine
This is slightly OT, but I have to tell somebody.
I wanted to buy a 70p item from the office vending machine. I had the exact amount in my wallet. No problem with the first three 20p coins, but my 10p was repeatedly rejected. So I pushed the coin return button, and got nothing back. It seems the machine will give change, but it won't allow you to cancel a transaction if you haven't inserted enough money to buy something. I expect this would the source of a tidy profit, were it not for the cost of replacing wrecked machines. Who designs the firmware for these things?
Aged 18-24? Don't care about voting? Got a phone? Oh dear...
Re: Healthy democracy
...a society where all the choices are the same and there is no way to make a meaningful choice...
Mainstream political parties tailor their policies to attract as many voters as possible. So it's inevitable that those policies tend to converge. To put it another way, the lack of choice reflects a concensus.
Obviously this is very annoying if your views differ from the concensus, but it doesn't mean that there exists a majority of people who are disenfranchised by lack of choice.