Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
I suspect that part of the problem is the way the browser environment blurs coding skills with presentational talent. High-end sites will have UX specialists and graphic designers, though it's still a coder's job to get the concept on to the screen. Many sites make do with coders who have some sense of design.
how it was impossible to convince a court of innocence when that was truly the case
It happens when you're up against an over-mighty state monopoly that will happily spend millions of other people's our money on lawyers. Governments are subject to democratic checks and balances, but an entity like the Post Office can get away with anything short of declaring war.
One oddity here is the BBC's report of the outcome. When I heard about it on Radio 4 News, it sounded like a very modest and contingent victory, with no mention of malicious prosecution and wrongful imprisonment. Why is the BBC soft-pedalling this?
Belated follow-up, in case anyone cares...
I've just been reading about the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor of the (British) East India Company, in (the British) parliament in 1788. Hastings was accused of "high crimes and misdemeanours", so the phrase evidently has its origins on the British side of the Atlantic. It appears to be a standard part of the impeachment process, although nobody has been impeached in Britain since 1806.
it was allegedly a misdemeanour
In my experience "misdemeanour" means something like "peccadillo", but it clearly has some technical meaning in the US legal system that I'm unaware of. The "high crimes and misdemeanours" that Trump stands accused of seems to imply that moderate crimes are to be expected of POTUS, but really serious and really trivial stuff is unacceptable.
Most of the meeting rooms I've spent time in over the past few years fall tragically short of this.
It's usually a case of looking for the remote control for the screen (which somebody has taken to another room), trying to connect your laptop (HDMI and DP connectors were never designed to be plugged and unplugged twenty times a day), and failing to erase the permanent-marker writing on the whiteboard.
Cortana, for one, has retreated into the depths of Microsoft's productivity suite
Dunno about that. Just last night I was re-installing Windows 10 (don't ask). As well as numerous restarts and requests to create a Microsoft account, I got the "Hi, I'm Cortana, let's set this puppy up!" treatment.
Sounds very like the successful approach Google took for machine translation. Forget trying to analyse and reverse-engineer the underlying problem, just perform an extensive examination of the superficialities. I know Google Translate is far from perfect, but it's far better than anything produced the analytical way.
Exactly! The core function of iPlayer is streaming TV programmes, and that hasn't changed, so there's no need for an update.
No doubt the BBC has been applying "improvements" to iPlayer's functionality, taking advantage of some shiny feature of recent TVs. Like amateur software developers everywhere, they've been so fixated with new features they forgot about backwards compatibility, disastrous when you're developing for millions of home devices.
A few months ago I kept finding that when I selected a programme to view, iPlayer seemed to show me a completely unrelated programme, so I went back to the menu and tried again. Turned out that some genius at the BBC had decided that we should all see a trailer before we watch the programme we actually asked for. Sod new features.
My experience is that iPlayer crashes rather more frequently than other streaming services. Why doesn't the BBC fix that?
Is there any empirical evidence for Chesterton's smart-arse comment?
Try substituting "magic", or "pantheism" for "god" (the word in the original quotation), and it sounds a lot less convincing. This suggests that the force of the statement is rather dependent on a prior belief in "god".
I worked there for about nine months. Not a bad job, but a poor contract rate, even for Cambridge. Many of the permies looked like they might have been enticed into an underpaid job by the game vibe.
The office was all done out with gamesy and sci-fi themes. The lift looked like the outside of the tardis, and the meeting rooms were named after Monopoly locations, so you could miss the first 15 minutes of a meeting while you wandered around the office looking for Old Kent Road. And they had an armoured personnel carrier parked outside.
The answer to your question is in the story. When the developers found out how much the VP was getting, "Angry staff confronted managers about Mudassir's evidently excessive pay packet".
More generally, employers and their HR departments like to keep a lid on any discussion of pay because it makes many employees accept what they're given without complaint.
Interested, and slightly concerned, to see things like "let i = 0;".
Coders who are ancient enough will recall early Basic interpreters where every assignment statement had to start with "let". It made programs read like the more pedantic sort of mathematical proof, but it made sense in natural language.
That quickly went away, and nothing more was heard of "let" for several decades. Then Ecma-Java-Type-Script found itself in need of a keyword for block-scope declarations and decided to revive "let". The new usage makes no sense when the variable isn't initialised when it's declared, and it's inconsistent with "var" and "const", which are (contractions of) nouns. "const x = 1;" - x is a constant, "var y;" - y is a variable. "let z;" - z is a... let? letter? letcher? lett? (There are curiously few nouns that begin with "let".)
Rather OT, but am I alone in finding the picture above this article creepy?
The two women seem to be pretending to hail a cab, but they aren't making a serious effort to be credible. They're looking away from the traffic on their side of the road, so they're presumably trying to flag down a cab on the opposite side, in which case they need to wave harder. Perhaps the one who's hardly waving at all should stick two fingers in her mouth and whistle?
I wonder how Kansas compares to the Lincolnshire Fens for flatness.
Rather bigger, I suspect.
It's initially impressive to learn that Denver* is the "mile-high city", but when you drive there from St Louis and find that it's just at the top of a thousand miles of very gradual slope, the magic goes out of it.
* Colorado, that is. The original Denver, site of Denver Sluice, is probably the six-inch-high city.
The "insect" is a birds eye view of a helicopter....
But only if the bird is directly above the helicopter, or directly below, flying upside-down. Actually, most birds' eyes are on the side of their heads, so it would have to be flying on its side in both cases. Can birds do that?
Nothing labeled and seventy different types of plug
There's a related problem with power bricks. My house now contains about 25 years-worth of devices that rely on a power brick for low-voltage DC supply. I also have a corresponding collection of supplies, but matching them up is a challenge.
The obvious thing would be to match on voltage and current. The bricks often have this printed on them, but the appliances are curiously cagey about their requirements. You'd think you could pair up the brands, but the bricks are always made by the likes of Jolly Chrysanthemum Inc of Kowloon.
And when you eventually find a supply that seems correct for the device you want to resurrect, it turns out that the connectors don't match.
All the components required fit inside a shoe box and functions in room temperature.
I know this is just a Reg measure of size, but it does create the unfortunate impression that this presumably sophisticated apparatus is just a breadboard full of bits salvaged from old radio sets and housed in a shoe box.
Also can anyone suggest what dialect "functions in room temperature" is? And where is the singular subject of "functions"?
This is the most fatuous of any of the numerous fatuous plans I've heard from politicians.
Remember the three-month wait for a phone line? The cast-iron modems that cost more than a week's wages? Remember the paragons of efficiency like British Railways? When I made this point to a colleague today, he said, "But they were starved of investment". That's OK, then, because nationalised industries are never starved of investment these days, are they?
And the cash for all this is going to come from taxing IT multinationals (today's version of the Magic Money Tree). If getting billions from Amazon and Apple and Google is so easy, why aren't we doing it already?
The excellent A Cheesemonger's History of The British Isles relates how British cheese was down to single figures in the 1970s. Now, it seems, there are about 700 varieties.
It goes against the grain to comment in favour of HMRC, but I suspect their argument would be that the million quid is spent to collect a thousand, and many subsequent thousands if they win*. How they justify it when they mostly lose, I can't imagine.
* cf "Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen" – George Savile
And please can we stop using AI (Artificial Intelligence) when we really mean ML (Machine Learning). Intelligent it wasn't.
Absolutely. And how long will it take for Machine Learning to replicate the result of several million years of evolution? In terms of spatial perception and ability to predict the path of objects in their surroundings, the rats and dogs driving cars on YouTube are far better equipped.
We've still got the original victorian mains line coming into the house
When I moved into my house about 20 years ago, the incoming power came via bare copper wires fixed to steel brackets on the gable-end. Whoever converted the village to underground cabling just cut down the overhead cables in the street, and hitched the bare wires to a cable that they routed across my neighbour's roof.
Look at the number of cars in a motorway car service station car park. Assume that 90% of those are going to want charging if EVs are the norm and they're going to want a charge in no more than 30 minutes that's going to last them for 3 hours at motorway speeds.
Do you suppose that 90% of the cars presently in the service area car park will fill up with petrol? I've no idea what the figure is, but I'd guess that no more than 20% of my stops are for refuelling*. Even adjusting for the lower range of EVs, that's still nowhere near 90%.
*and that's definitely not because I like service stations.
While I wish the GNOME Foundation every success, I can't help wondering whether FOSS gives them a hidden strength.
If they win, the unspeakable RPI picks up the costs, and its patent is weakened or invalidated.
If they lose, and there is a massive award plus costs against them, they can fork the project and dissolve the foundation. I've no idea what sort of corporate entity the foundation is, and what guarantees underpin it, but there's no question that its principle asset is in the public domain.
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