* Posts by werdsmith

7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

If I create an army of straw men, am I depriving a military commander of his job?

Absolutely ridiculous naive bollocks.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

Absolute, unqualified nonsense.

https://legalvision.co.uk/employment/volunteers-workplace/

It is internships which require payment by a for profit employer. Internships being slightly different from volunteering.

The idea of working for a profit business for no pay if the business is making good money does qualify under fucking stupid though.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

You have demonstrated that you don't know what open source is (it's not for profit, for example),

MySQL was purchased for $1 billion by Sun. Sun which amounted to MySQL and Java was purchased for $5.6 billion by Oracle. Oracle is now miking both of those projects because Oracle didn’t buy Sun because Larry was feeling benevolent.

People know what Open Source is, but they also understand how the world actually works and how idealism is just a nice idea.

Wanna run Windows on an M-series Mac? Fine, buy a license, but no baremetal

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Windows is no longer a necessity...

Affinity (not open source) has replaced Adobe for me, with a few minor workarounds for co-working with people still happy to pay subscriptions to Adobe.

But GIMP is dogshit, it really is.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Windows is no longer a necessity...

Try again with your definition of "all".

Because your all doesn't apply to mine.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: More Windows on ARM is good

In which nations is the rise of Chromebooks happening? Because I've not really noticed any, there was a little flurry but they seem to have faded.

Japan recovers moon lander data, puts craft to sleep due to solar panels' bad attitude

werdsmith Silver badge

I think the rotation was intended to be initiated by contact on the sloping edge of the inside of the crater. But one foot contacting first on a raised surface feature, would be interesting to see how they planned to cope with that.

werdsmith Silver badge

Don't know if it fell over, it was actually meant to land on a different side down compared to the in flight orientation, so if one of the landing legs contacted the ground or an obstruction before the other, it may have landed correctly on its legs but turned. But perhaps it did a slow motion fall onto one side. I don't know how weight is distributed within the chassis but it does have a top heavy look to it.

werdsmith Silver badge

I understand that LEV-1 has autonomous direct to earth comms and it also relays comms for LEV-2.

As far as I know, these two are working and they will be used to photograph the SLIM lander which seems to have suffered a rotation about at least one of its axes on landing. I believe that the data downloads for images will take some time.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

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All of the Donner Party reached California. Just not all the way to Sac.

Ransomware attacks hospitalizing security pros, as one admits suicidal feelings

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Re: Eh, if you can’t stand the heat…

I could only do such a role because the consequences of failure could be disastrous to a lot of other people. My entire career has been about roles I can enjoy without stress, which is a situation worth more than any amount of cash.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

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Re: Yupp

The aforementioned "Backroom Boys" suggests that there is a Fibonacci sequence involved.

At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form

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Re: BASIC

I guess Python is the new BASIC, but what's the minimum hardware for that?

Casio and TI calculators have Python interpreters.

Micro Python runs on little microcontrollers like Raspberry Pico 2040 for a couple of quid.

BASIC of the time didn’t really have distinct function blocks but it did have conditional branching so was OK as a starter language.

What are our top picks from the vast world of retro tech? Let's find out

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Re: Lotus Notes is still being developed

I’ve never felt the need to do any of that stuff.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

werdsmith Silver badge

AI working and humans enjoying permanent leisure time or creative pursuits is surely the utopian ideal we should be aiming for.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

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Re: Backwards

Picking two what?

This is the actual syllabus headlines for GCSE :

Fundamentals of algorithms

Programming

Fundamentals of data representation

Computer systems

Fundamentals of computer networks

Cyber security

Relational databases and structured query language (SQL)

Ethical, legal and environmental impacts of digital technology on wider society, including issues of privacy

Assessments

You won 't find anything about "underlining and right justifying in Word". Which is what I was responding to.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The tube

Is a bit off in my view. Most people learned to program the BBC at school

BBC? Never saw one, it was a rich persons computer. The equivalent chunk of salary now would be a Macbook Pro purchase.

Spectrums were in homes and more affordable, turned up on more birthdays and christmas mornings. People had their own with unfettered access at home, rather than the occasional access at school (iuf your school had a BBC Micro, mine never did).

5 million spectrums+ were built and sold but despite the support of the government, the BBC and some schools, less than a million of all variants on BBC Micro. (https://bbcmicro.computer/how-many-made).

No chance that me or any of my peers were getting hands on a BBC Micro, I just about managed to obtain a ZX81 and that got me rolling. You'll find there are many more ZX babies than Acorn ones and that's where the deep legacy is.

The Commmodore machines, after Vic-20 were popular but far more of those were just used as games consoles with a keyboard.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Where is the Pi going though?

Yeah, I nearly ordered a new motorcycle last week but I worked out that it was cheaper to buy a Ford Transit which would give exactly the same experience…..

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Backwards

Somebody hasn’t checked the modern CS syllabus for GCSE and O level before commenting.

Do you still think they do the old IT stuff from 15 years ago?

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

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Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

Are you seriously saying that the big hole full of shit was already there, and that it was just covered by a thin layer of concrete? Wow.

Where did I say that? You are seriously deluded.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

That's the elevated top layer of pad that has been broken through.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

I’d like to know where the “crater” was that Musk learned from?

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

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Re: ZX81

Similar story here.

It’s very hard to describe to a young person what it was like to get your hands on a programmable computer and see the on screen prompt appear for the first time.

When before that there was nothing.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "their substantial egos"

ZX81 manual was a above a sci-fi building / cityscape with dramatic dusky lighting.

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

werdsmith Silver badge

Yes, a nice manual choke to forget to switch off so the car car rich-run for 100 miles.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "only five percent believe this surveillance should be unrestricted"

As I couldn't find the words to express how stupid I found that statement

There's a reason you couldn't find those words.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Big brother is creeping up behind you.

There is no legal obligation to indicate before turning.

This is true and it's also unwise to trust the indication of other drivers.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The older the better

Problem is, when you exaggerate an anecdote like this, there are many of us reading who have experience with these cars and we know it is bullshit.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The older the better

One of the biggest challenges is the bit where the camera see you getting to close to a white line without having used an indicator so takes over the steering to move you away from it - straight into the pothole/vehicle you were trying to avoid

I've driven several makes of cars with this feature and more. It doesn't work like that at all. You feel the steering in your hands kind of reminding you and urging you to move away from the line, but it doesn't take over and is overridden with minimal resistance. If you ignored it because you weren't paying attention to your driving (like falling asleep or looking at a phone) then it would guide keep the car in lane. It's also easy to switch off.

Newer cars have more engineered in safety, energy absorption is improving all the time. If somebody driving carefully in a revered old classic meets an idiot in a new car who causes a collision then the likelihood is that the idiot walks away with ears ringing from airbag infation. The classic car driver will have an extended stay in hospital, if they are lucky.

werdsmith Silver badge

Rule 1 of good business. Give the customers what they want.

Honda suffered bad publicity when Toyota maintained their Burnaston factory, Nissan stayed in the NorthEast but Honda closed their Swindon plant.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: A happy life?

I also have a TomTom SatNav, a cheap entry level one with free updates for life. I stopped using it some time ago when I started getting cars with builtin nav.

Last week I hired a Transit with no sat nav. I dug out the old TomTom and plugged it in, pulled up the TomTom websites and a message "your map data is over 42 months old, please update".

Clicked update, and it loaded maps from October 2023.

Also, if you connect to website it downloads the latest satellite data for quicker fix.

I understand some TOMTOM sat navs with western europe maps sstopped updating because all western europe data outgrew the available storage on the device, but it is still possible to down load a single country.

A few years back there were a load of lies in tabloids about stopping updates for eol devices. TomTom tried to clarify, but the dirty media ignored it, and loads of thickos sucked it up.

werdsmith Silver badge

A Honda Connect subscription used to be 1 year free with a new car and then paid after that.

Very few people took up the subscription, so it is now 3 years free.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: "I hate that I don't own Microsoft Office or Photoshop. "

Gimp.

That’s really not a decent option, for mine and many requirements it’s a pile of crap. But Affinity is a good perpetual license alternative.

Affinity also provide alternatives to other applications in the Adobe stable.

Media experts cry foul over AI's free lunch of copyrighted content

werdsmith Silver badge

I've read loads of stuff on the internet and learned loads from it. Didn't pay for most of it because it didn't ask me.

So who do I owe money to now?

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

werdsmith Silver badge

Going to be fun flying when the camera gets iced up …

Or facing a screen full of log dump text including the words "kernel" and "panic".

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: The Polestar 2: A Cutting-Edge Electric Sedan for the Tech-Savvy Traveler

Volvo is a Swedish brand.

It's not owned by a Swedish company, but it's still a Swedish brand.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: EV rentals

The EVs internal sat nav automatically finds public chargers, that's not the problem.

Switching over to actually driving something unfamiliar in a place that is unfamiliar is more of a problem, when convenience is required.

Why do IT projects like the UK's scandal-hit Post Office Horizon end in disaster?

werdsmith Silver badge

At much smaller scale I been in the situation where the sales / bid teams have made unrealistic promises about cost and time to land a contract and then dumped on the engineering teams to deliver.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Building software is hard...

The web was better with NCSA Mosaic than with any browser since

NCSA Mosaic and the web were an order of magnitude simpler then. You cannot predict how it would have evolved.

Private lunar lander Peregrine mission's now measured in hours, not days

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Soft Landing

There's a world of difference between an instrument as part of a scientific payload and a lander.

IF only the OU had access to help from the Indian Space Agency 20 years ago.

werdsmith Silver badge

Soft Landing

The EMS is a project of The Open University. Perhaps they will learn to go with the Indian missions if they want a decent chance of a successful moon landing.

America's first private lunar lander suffers 'critical' fuel leak en route to Moon

werdsmith Silver badge

It’s time for them to turn to the Indian Space Agency for help with how to fly a flawless soft moon landing mission.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Corporations

Yes, I don’t believe that going without rest is good for the people or the project. If they haven’t got shift teams available then that’s not heroic, it’s another failure.

Mobileye shares crash after warning of automotive customers' chip glut

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Who wants self driving?

I want no more deaths or serious injuries on the roads as a priority.

Human egos cause many of these and are unlikely to improve.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: oh it will not propogate

Because the position of the failure is the place where a plug to replace an emergency exit is fitted.

The airline chose not to have an emergency exit here.Presumably to squeeze in more seats.

The plug failed. Similar to losing an actual door.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

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Re: Cases don't really matter

No. The cases make a huge difference to what happens to a phone when it’s dropped.

AMD talks up car chips it hopes will join you for a ride some time soon

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Re: Some people do like this up to a point

DRL was going to be made law I think, there were environmental objections. Now the modern LED array has an insignificant effect on fuel consumption so it should be OK for modern cars that have them.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: pre-1995 vehicles

And if the fuel is still available.

I see the task of obtaining ordinary petrol and diesel in 10 years time will be similar to finding LPG fuel today.

Need to plug in an EV? BT Group kicks off cabinet update pilot

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Re: Another of Baldrick's "Cunning Plans"

What has your imagination got to do with anything? These are a 7KW power supply at random places in streets that are becoming available for repurpose. So they take the power feed from the box and present it a couple of metres away. So all the whinging about cables across pavements is destroyed and the whiners are disappointed and need to look for some other outlet for their negativity.

Why wasn't it obvious to everyone that the cables would not lie on top of the pavement? FFS get a grip.