Posts by Nick Kew

Re: But does YouTube really hate it?

Any regulation runs the risk of unintended consequences. You may have just identified one.

Or perhaps one reason the commission itself watered down its original draft was that someone convinced them of this very point?

Re: I can believe it!

Hmm. None of you worked in the kind of corporate environment where the printer is/was in a forbidden area? Or simply a completely unknown location that's never the same two jobs running? Out of paper was indeed a problem one couldn't deal with oneself.

Re: Wrong way round?

@Mage - that's 20th century (and, to an extent, older) trends you're describing. The rise of megacorps.

Re: Governing America

After April too. Michael Gove (whose ministerial responsibility includes food) gave a categorical assurance in an interview broadcast on the morning of Jan 5th. No lowering of food standards, including on imports.

Meaning of course a No to the US red lines on a trade deal. No US food standards, no US trade deal, and most of the brexit controversies are moot. In particular, Gove's assurance is precisely what the EU need to hear for the Irish Border Problem to go away.

... or would be, if only a government minister's assurances carried weight against brexit ideology.

Re: Don't worry, it's only money

Not just Cornwall.

See a really nice Dartmoor house? An affordable £250k, probably because it needs work, like installing modern electrics and connecting to water mains, not to mention general refurbishment for (if nothing bad turns up) a large six-digit builders bill.

Look at the smallprint. That £250k isn't the house, it's a lease that expires in 2026, after which you pony up all over again for up to a 20 year maximum. Could that be why noone has put in the investment to modernise? Oh, and you're also paying £7k/year rent, which will also have to be renegotiated when the term is up.

That's what it's like having Charles's mafia on your patch.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

Foreign intervention has been openly taking place for well over 30 years.

Most famous (but not I think the worst) instance: Rupert Murdoch.

Re: Wow, it's almost...

You do realise that she is an elected MP?

For those of us who don't live in Maidenhead (and who the **** can afford that?), she's not elected. I've never had the opportunity to vote for or against her, not even in theory.

Of course she's in a Damned-if-you-Do/Don't position, with an undefined decision to implement, and thugs who make Tommy Robinson sound like the voice of reason claiming "52%" for their fantasy.

Hmm, looks like a manifestation of what I posted two and a half years ago:

That’s an agenda claiming – and believing they have – a 52% electoral mandate, yet not really representing even the whole of the BNP/UKIP. Give them their isolationism and we can rapidly slip back to poverty, and with less food or energy security than even in the 1970s. Deny it to them and it seems most unlikely they’ll shut up.

Re: At least people can take comfort from the fact that ...

Thanks for invoking that great cultural memory.

Carry On Flying. Sid James pulls stunts to distract attention from [subplot involving Windsor's assets and evil genius Williams]. Clouseau-eqsue cop Bresslaw devotes lots of effort to Innocent Hawtrey seen in possession of kiddies model aircraft that doesn't fly. Any screenwriters want to flesh something out?

Re: Width

Too much text at El Reg? Tosh!

I trust El Reg is not so dumb as to give even a moment's thought to following the stupid trend of many websites to emulate a vacuous powerpoint.

A metric for management failure

Our Parliament looks like an interesting case of extreme management failure. Both for itself (failure to manage necessary building maintenance) and for the country (b*****).

While few can aspire to rival that, we can nevertheless use it as a yardstick. This never-never update could no doubt clock up a few MicroParliaments.

Re: Naming conventions

Not entirely original. Homer got there first, where Odysseus outwits the Cyclops. But still a jolly wheeze.

In school?

Computers existed, and were indeed beginning to appear in schools by the time I left. But not in the kind of school I went to, that relied on the state for its budget.

I had the impression you were of a comparable vintage yourself?

@jake - Round about 2000?

Those of us whose education pre-dates computer science as a supposedly-serious degree subject[1] started with all sorts of gaps in our knowledge. Noone explained to me heap vs stack, I just figured it out on the job sometime back in the 1980s.

[1] Including some who later taught the subject, and whose graduates emerged qualified for things their professors never will be on the recruiters' tickboxes.

Re: RE: Getting one over on the boss

Once upon a less-than-happy time, I was tasked with setting up a company mailserver to keep copies of everything (company afraid of lawyers).

On paper.

With all attachments. OK, I made that one up: they didn't think of attachments, but I did, and pointed out some issues with them.

Re: Handy stuff this automation.

One day indeed. In my case, starting in the 1980s.

Trouble is, when you're in a busy office, automating jobs away just leaves you without a job. Going home would be noticed.

Re: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

I can cite working examples! How about the moon's orbit, for one?

For values of perpetual in not just human but geological time ...

Re: Needs the human touch

I have cron jobs that run at hour+delta, where delta is a small number of minutes. It's a habit I started when working on busy shared systems, and I thought it made sense to offset my jobs from the likeliest peaks of scheduled activity.

In a one-off script, I might do something like

$ run-job-1

$ sleep 30

$ run-job-2

... etc

Re: Worst one I've heard of

Don't assume. Look at all the grief Private Widdle's underwear caused.

Re: Access Denied

@Goldmember - I'd veto them on grounds of the prolific spam they inflicted.

Re: @AC "wouldn't be common freakin' sense to not surf dodgy websites at work?"

As early as the early 1980s, Internet bandwidth getting maxed out always meant porn.

1980s porn being ASCII porn. As in (.) (.) . If you mean anything more ambitious, I'll refer you to this from my blog.

I guess you never worked in a data-heavy environment.

First web server I set up for $work was about access to satellite image data. The expectation was that clients would order the actual data on tape[1], but I convinced management to allow limited online actual download. The limit was eventually set to 10Mb, for those whose line would hold up for the very long time that would take.

[1] The fact they could use a nice WWW GUI including an applet to select a dataset from an interactive and zoomable map display was radical for the time. A few years later ('96 or '97) Java applets arrived and some of that capability migrated to clientside.

Re: @AC "wouldn't be common freakin' sense to not surf dodgy websites at work?"

Then there was this thing called USENET so you really didn't have to go to dodgy web sites to surf.

Damn, I've led a sheltered life. Never encountered usenet binaries: they were one of those mythical things.

Re: "wouldn't be common freakin' sense to not surf dodgy websites at work?"

2) (In the 1990s) It is faster than my 56K connection

You've led a sheltered life there.

56K? Pah. I was lucky to get 56 bytes. Per minute, at work, and home was little better.